


Here We Go, Bluebird

by Distractivate



Series: The Birds They Sang - Post-Apocalyptic Love Stories [2]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: #VanLife, (Sort of more like wagon trips?), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Bunkers, Discussion of Grief/Loss, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, Long-Term Relationship(s), Marriage, Mother-Son Relationship, Multi, No sweet potatoes were harmed in the making of this fic, Road Trips, Set in the Universe of Blackbird Fly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:40:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27666911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Distractivate/pseuds/Distractivate
Summary: Set in the post-apocalyptic universe of my ficBlackbird, Fly, Marcy and Clint Brewer embark on a desperate search for their son, Patrick.This is a stand-alone story. Knowledge of the first fic in the series is not required.
Relationships: Clint Brewer/Marcy Brewer, Marcy Brewer & Patrick Brewer, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: The Birds They Sang - Post-Apocalyptic Love Stories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022743
Comments: 192
Kudos: 174





	1. This pair of wings worn and rusted

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this about a year ago, before certain Current Events, but I’ve been working on it on and off ever since. It's been an escape for me, but that doesn't mean parts of it don’t hit closer to home than they might have a year ago. This story is not intended to be graphic or intense, but these things are subjective. Only you can know if you are someone who will appreciate a story like this in times such as these. Please take care of yourself. 
> 
> I tried to keep this relatively spoiler-free for anyone who has not read _Blackbird, Fly_ with one major exception that was unavoidable. You certainly don't need to know what happens in that fic to get what's going on here, although there are a few easter eggs along the way. This story begins before Blackbird, finishes after it, and involves many new places and characters. If you're looking to pick up roughly where Blackbird leaves off, you could start in Chapter 4. I’m definitely not saying you _should_ do that, or that I want you to, but if you don't tell me, I'll never know lol.
> 
> In all the stories in this universe, I chose not to specify the cause of the devastation, and simply described the aftermath. I do want to add that there is no mention of serious illness, pandemics, explicit violence, or government nonsense of any kind, though I left lots of room for you to insert your own headcanon if you really want to.
> 
> Rated M because married people have (soft focus) sex and because of the subject matter.
> 
> Work and chapter titles from [Bluebird](https://youtu.be/Ovhu_8qHBj4) by Sara Bareillies.

On their last day in Cedar Grove, Clint shows up at the clinic just before noon looking grim-faced. He pulls her aside between patients and murmurs, “They’re closing Highway 10 to westbound traffic at four. It’s time.”

Marcy glances at the small reception area. Ms. Ryan is holding a towel to one leg while her four-year-old clings to the other, and Mr. Thomas looks like he’s about to collapse. Both late-added appointments who wouldn’t be here if they weren’t desperate. Her staff is gone, except for her nurse, Dana, who is scurrying to switch over the exam room. Her partners evacuated the day before. It’s just her now, the last physician at Cedar Grove Medical Group. 

“I need an hour.”

Clint’s eyes are pleading. “Marcy. Honey. We said—”

“I know.” She shakes her head. They should have left weeks ago. They promised Patrick. Themselves. They would get out while they could. They don’t have enough fuel to idle on the highway with the other stragglers in a sea of red taillights. She looks back at Mr. Thomas. “Just an hour. I need an hour.” Then, more softly, “Please.”

Clint nods, his mouth a tight, thin line.

“Mr. Thomas, room four,” she says, 

“An hour, that’s it.” Clint presses a kiss to her forehead.

“An hour.” She pats his face and then follows Mr. Thomas into the back.

Dana takes his vitals while Marcy probes gently at his stomach, cataloguing the locations where his pain is the most severe. What Mr. Thomas needs is a few lab tests, several days of rest, and probably an endoscopy. Since none of that is possible now, she’ll have to give him a prescription that he won’t be able to fill and as many of the PPI sample packets as she has left. 

She sends him on his way, feeling useless and frustrated, and considers following him out the door. What can she really do for anyone at this point? But Ms. Ryan is still sitting there with her son, a knobby-kneed boy who looks so much like her own child did at that age, the pair of them looking up hopefully. She ushers them into the exam room. 

Thankfully, she can do something for Ms. Ryan, who needs eight sutures above her knee. 

As she’s finishing the last stitch, the little boy taps her on the arm. “Do you like cats or dogs better?”

“Shh, Henry, Dr. Brewer needs to concentrate.” 

“He’s fine. I like cats,” she says with a wink as she snips the thread. “And you’re all set.”

“Me too,” he whispers conspiratorially. “My cat is called Pepper.”

“Pepper is a great name for a cat,” Marcy says with a laugh. She can’t help it. She’s about to get in a van loaded with everything from their house that would fit and go as far west as they can in hopes of reaching Patrick tomorrow, because the world is literally on fire, and there’s something so hopeful about this little boy determined to ask normal questions.

The hour is almost up, so Marcy gives Ms. Ryan care instructions in a rush while she gathers what she can in the way of bandages, disinfectant wipes, and any other supplies that might be helpful to them. Between staff, partners, and patients, they’ve cleaned out most of their surplus inventory. But she manages to unearth a few packets of NSAIDs and two bottles of children’s vitamins.

“Save them until you’re low on fresh food,” she says, dropping the bottles into the tote bag in Ms. Ryan’s hands.

Normally she’d update charts, clean up her desk, check her email. There’s no point now. 

As they leave, Dana calls after her, “Do you want me to lock it?”

“No. If there’s anything of value left, let’s make it easy to find.”

Dana’s hand lingers on the knob, and for a second they both look up at the clinic sign, glowing green against the threatening sky.

Marcy gathers her in a hug. “Goodbye. Drive safe.”

“You too.”

When she gets in the van, Clint’s knuckles are white along the curve of the steering wheel. He clicks off the radio with a twist of the knob. Wind blasts one side of the car, splattering it with ashy dust that coats the windshield.

Clint squints through the grime and flips on the windshield wiper. “Ready?”

“Ready,” she confirms. “Have you heard from Patrick?”

He shakes his head as he turns out of the parking lot. “No. Nothing since yesterday. Can’t get through.”

“We’ll keep trying,” she says. 

“We’ll keep trying,” he agrees.

* * *

By the time they pull up in front of the old heavy-timber barn, half-submerged into the side of a hill and refurbished with bulletproof windows and a new, reinforced-concrete interior framework, it must be almost dawn. It’s hard to tell. The sky is charred black. The air is thick and so, so hot; it heats up Marcy’s worst fears until terror begins simmering just under her skin. They haven’t been able to reach Patrick or any of Clint’s brothers. Her phone is dead, and Clint’s is on the last ten percent of battery.

They left too late. Some part of her knew that. But it became clear after an hour, when traffic stopped moving completely and cars began coming back along the shoulders of the highway. Eventually they were rerouted east with everyone else, following thousands of cars, some drivers honking and yelling out windows, others staring numbly ahead. At Hawthorne Ridge, the first opportunity to circle back on a different road, they did. That was yesterday. They used almost all of Clint’s stockpiled gasoline to get here.

“We just need to get as far as Ashville,” Clint said as they drove. Kept saying, like a mantra, all the way to Ashville and then south to this little collection of farms in the middle of nowhere. It’s the backup plan, the one they were never supposed to need. The one they wouldn’t have needed if Marcy hadn’t asked for that extra hour. 

“An hour wouldn’t have made a difference,” Clint says, reading the quiver of her mouth as much as her mind, and reaching for Marcy’s hand. “We wouldn’t even have made it leaving two days ago, I don’t think.”

“It just seemed like there was more time.” She hates the way her voice sounds, thin and wobbly. 

“I know. Shh, I know.” Clint turns his hands to weave their fingers together more firmly.

They were supposed to have time. And then everything changed so, so quickly. They’d just spoken with Patrick on a family video call. They’d even ribbed him a little about his new haircut, shorter and tidier than he usually wears it. 

“Must have his eye on someone,” Clint joked, which made Patrick cranky, which made them laugh some more. 

And when they finished talking, she said, “I love you,” and “Be safe,” and “Goodbye,” because she always did. Not because she realized it might be the last time she ever got to say those things to him. 

“Honey,” she manages, before any other words she might say are drowned in soft sobbing.

“Oh, no, here,” he says, pulling her in. “Hey, shh. Look. There’s a light on inside.” Clint points to the small front window. “We’re not the first ones here.”

She nods and tries to collect herself. Clint knocks and then uses his keys in the three sets of deadbolts on the door. 

Her brother-in-law rises from a light sleep on the couch to greet them with, “Well. Looks like that quack Ray Butani was right.” His voice is too loud and brash for her fried nerves. They’ve been up all night, haven’t slept properly in weeks, and she just wants to be with Patrick or with no one. 

“Stop it, Greg,” his wife, Beth, says, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and swatting him on the hip. Beth gathers her into a hug. “We’re so relieved to know you’re okay. C’mere, hon.” 

“Is it just us?” Clint asks, exchanging a brisk hug with his brother.

“Phil is here too. And the kids and grandkids. And Marce, your cousin and his wife got here last night.”

She nods, still huddled into Beth’s shoulder. It’s the first bit of good news. That means everyone made it. They’re the last to arrive. It doesn’t do much to ease the weight pressing against her ribcage.

“Come with me,” Beth says. “Greg and I will unpack your van. I’m sure you could both use some sleep.”

Beth shows her one of the three bunk rooms, a quiet, dark space in the back corner of the musty old barn they bought for this purpose. One stack of bunkbeds is empty. Her cousin Rick and his wife Diane both stir in the other bunk.

“Hi,” Rick mumbles, groggy with sleep.

“Shh, don’t get up,” Marcy says. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

Marcy and Clint weren’t supposed to be here, but she’s grateful they planned the extra beds and provisions for them just in case. The only reason any of them are here is because of Clint. And Clint is here because of Patrick, or really, because of his boss. Ray Butani. 

She only met him in person once, when Patrick first took the job. Ray, notorious for being something of an eccentric entrepreneur before all this, began making the talk-show circuit with his doomsday predictions and tips for prepping for the worst. He smiled his way through countless interviews where jokes were made at his expense, until eventually he was considered too laughable to even invite on the shows. When Patrick broke up with Rachel and started working for Ray, started calling him surprising and smart and creative, Clint and Marcy were genuinely worried for him.

But over time, that changed. He seemed happy, working for Ray, and he took him seriously, always. And eventually, when Patrick would make offhand remarks about sourcing hydroponics systems or arranging for an order of canned beans by the tons, Clint began to take Ray seriously, too. 

When he showed his brothers the land, the barn, the money he thought it would take to buy them two years of provisions and shelter, he finished with, “C’mon. We’ll do it together.” 

And just like the matching Cedar Grove High Mighty Moose tattoos they got, they’d joked around about what a dumb idea it was until they grew bored of jokes and forked over the money. All in. 

Patrick was skeptical when they told him. “Let them do that. Ray has been planning this for years. Everything we’ll need is here. We’ll stay together.”

Marcy remembers that ice crept down her veins at the tense set of his jaw on that video call, the way his fingers tapped their anxiety with a staccato rhythm on the table, shaking his phone. She realized it wasn’t about _if_ anymore to Patrick, it was _when_. 

“It’s the only way I’ll know you’re safe,” he added. “I’ll call you when it’s time to come.” 

After some discussion, they agreed. He called. And they didn’t leave right away because she had appointments the next day. And one day wasn’t supposed to matter. Except it did, and now she’s safe, at least, but nowhere near where she wants to be. And her sweet boy is going to go to bed not knowing what became of them. Possibly for a month or more. 

She looks at Clint in the mirror as they’re brushing their teeth before bed. “I should have told you to go without me. Then he wouldn’t be alone.”

Clint spits out his toothpaste in the sink. “And what about you?”

“I would have been okay,” she lies.

He studies her under the icy blue low-voltage bathroom lighting. “Well I wouldn’t have.” 

In the end, it’s not just a month living on top of each other in the barn-turned-bunker. For two years, they barely move. At first, they spend their days reading and playing games, maintaining the water filtration and hydroponics systems, trying to make the best of it. Clint plays guitar at night, her cousin Diane sings along to spare them Clint’s warbling, and his brother Phil mixes drinks for everyone. Greg makes them laugh with his off-color jokes, and Beth makes them laugh harder by ribbing him for them. Sometimes Marcy can even find the positives.

Still, Marcy keeps a countdown, and tries not to get too attached to the date this is all supposed to be over. As weeks turn into months, as the first year turns over into the next, there is no amount of acceptance that soothes the undercurrent of anger about how things were supposed to be. The calendar ticks by birthdays of people she can’t call, weekend getaways they aren’t going to take. _How things were supposed to be_ becomes a specter over their days, a shadow of everything they’re missing that never gets easier to miss. Eventually, she rips up the calendar and throws it in the composter. Time still collapses and expands, but at least she’s not watching it play tricks on her anymore.

Outside, things get worse instead of better. When one of them goes out to sweep ash off the solar array or repair damage from a storm, they wear so much equipment it looks like they’re stepping onto the moon, and come back looking like they’ve been dragged along the bottom of the sea.

The first time Marcy steps outside in full protective gear, she just needs to know that she can. Needs to see that the world has not actually shrunk to the four concrete-reinforced walls of this barn. She walks around the side of the barn and looks across the open fields, desaturated in the hazy light. 

When her mother died, Marcy and Patrick went through and organized all of her photographs. Among them was an old photograph of a house that looked a lot like the one she’d grown up in. The date on the back said 1914. She remembers squinting at it, comparing the shutters and the big porch and the shape of the roofline. This is a little bit like that. It’s undeniably the same world, but the details aren’t quite right. It’s too dull, too still, too blurry, too frayed. There’s a fracture between what she sees and the memory she has of it, a fracture caused more by how different it feels than how different it looks. 

She stays longer than she’s supposed to. It’s just so quiet. So still. She hasn’t been alone, hasn’t heard silence, in so long. She’s never heard silence like this, like she’s the only living thing. 

She keeps to herself for the rest of the day, or as much as she can in the crowded space. She opens a book she’s read four times already, just in case anyone is tempted to talk. No one interrupts her. They all have days like this. 

“Thought this might help,” Clint says a few hours later, bringing her a small cup of their precious, special occasion tea. It’s the perfect drinking temperature. 

“Thank you.”

He doesn’t ask her any questions, and for that she kisses him and drops her head against his shoulder. They fall asleep that way and everyone leaves them be. 

Some days, there isn’t enough to do to keep the panic at bay. Those days are long and Marcy goes to bed more tired than she has ever been. Those days are almost worse than the days where there are too many things to do, when one of their delicate systems isn’t working properly, and they have to play a tense, irritable game against the clock and the available supplies and equipment. At least on those days she has something to fight. She was always better in crisis.

As a doctor, Marcy is used to crisis. Used to being at the mercy of nature and frustrated by the gap between what she can observe and what she knows about what she can observe. She’s used to grief too, understands the need to name a loss, even a small one, even one that only matters to her, so she can grieve it. But there’s a point, somewhere in the time when the calendar, the countdown, ceases to matter, where she doesn’t have any fucking patience for grief anymore. So she tries to accept that for a while, maybe for a long while, she’s not going to feel okay, even if, physically at least, she is.

When the air quality meters finally register a drop into the yellow range for a full week, Marcy joins Clint by one of the tiny windows and tucks into his side. It’s hard to see much outside, either from the thickness of the glass or the thickness of the air. Everything is a smudge of green-gray.

“I’d feel more comfortable with a month at yellow. Just to see if it holds,” he whispers quietly. 

“No.” She squeezes him closer, rubs her cheek against the soft, worn threads of his sweater. “We have to go. I have to—I can’t just—” Marcy huffs out a breath and turns to look at her husband, who already looks like he knows what she’s going to say. She says it anyway. “We have to find him.”


	2. From too many years by my side

The heat lingers on her skin, heavy and wet. It pools in the hollows of her eyes, collects around her hairline at her temples, and soaks into the cotton t-shirt she sleeps in. Clint is already awake and gone, with only an indentation in his place. They have nowhere to be, which for Clint means moving anyway, just to be somewhere.

She tries to roll over but a rigid knot in her lower back stops her. Some days, having nowhere to be means she doesn’t move at all. Marcy Brewer was made to diagnose and treat and heal. She was not made to sleep on a cheap foam mattress in a campervan on a dusty roadside.

As part of his backup plan, Clint had this van converted to a dystopian dream camper, complete with rainwater collection, manual filtration, and a small, portable solar-powered light. When it was time to leave the barn, they packed as many of their things as they could fit, then gathered their extended family around the van to say farewell. Beth and Marcy hugged a tearful goodbye, sisters by choice as much as by marriage now.

“We’ll send word if we can,” Marcy told her.

Beth squeezed her more tightly. “We’ll see you again. I know we will.”

Marcy said she hoped she was right and left it at that. Everything felt too fragile for long-term plans.

Just before they set off, Clint revealed the final touch, a #VanLife bumper sticker he’d been saving for three years for this precise moment. He was so proud of himself, and Marcy was so relieved to finally be moving, that she kissed him and only rolled her eyes a little bit.

It was supposed to be a joke. They weren’t supposed to make a life in this space. It was supposed to be a temporary home for the week or two it would take to get from Ashville to Patrick. It was supposed to be a stopgap in case roads were difficult or unsafe, so they wouldn’t have to depend on strangers for shelter or food or kindness. It was supposed to be a way to move as much of their things as possible from their old life to their new home.

It’s not a joke now.

Navigating the roads west of Ashville was more difficult than they expected. Most of the signage had been ripped out, probably to repurpose the poles and framework for other things. What remained were painted over with messages that made wayfinding difficult. Offramps and overpasses were already suffering from lack of maintenance. It wasn’t as simple as following the highway west.

Until the last day or so, they had been within the official evacuation zone. Most of the towns they drove through were vacant. Some looked little-changed, albeit dusty and empty. Others looked like they’d been pulverized, with window openings in the remaining buildings blinking back at them like dull, cold eyes. Roads were erratically blocked with debris, causing enough unexpected detours that they already worried about running out of fuel.

For the last fifty kilometers, they curved around cliffs and followed the bank of a small creek until neither of them were sure if they were still headed west. The sun, buried deep behind the ominous clouds, was little help.

Someone had painted dozens of the billboards along the curving highway with alternating messages of _He loves me_ and _He loves me not_. From her side of the bed on the raised platform above the storage compartment in the back third of the van, she can see part of the closest billboard through the rear windshield. The advertisement is almost completely stripped off, with only a fragment of a web address remaining.

Shortly after they made camp here, a storm ripped off part of the sign board. Now it just reads, _He loves_ , in thick, blue letters, dried drips splattered below on the pale, dirt-streaked surface. Sometimes, when she wakes up and sees it, she wishes she were the type of person who believes in signs. She’s just not, and she’s reluctant to give up any more of who she is than she already has.

Before they could get real and truly lost, Clint pulled onto the shoulder to dig a compass out one of their boxes of supplies. Compass in hand, he turned the ignition to a dull click. The van never started again. Clint thinks the problem is the battery, but really, they were supposed to leave two years ago. Instead it’s just been sitting in a garage. The van doesn’t seem to have handled the inertia of the bunker any better than the rest of them. It could be the battery. It could be anything.

She should get up. It’s hard to know what time it is with the ever-present dull-gray light. It’s dark and then it’s ten a.m. until it’s dark again. She’ll be mad at herself if it gets dark and she’s still lying here.

Rising happens in slow motion, small movements, grunts, a gentle stretch when she feels like it won’t reaggravate everything. She drops one foot out of bed with enough momentum to pull herself up, another wipe of her forehead and her eyes, another wince. She chugs water from the bottle by her bedside, trying to chase away the taste of cinders that coats her tongue when she sleeps. When she finally stands, the plywood floor is tacky against her feet in the humidity. It’s been worse than usual since the last storm.

With her eyes closed and her toes flexing and gripping the grain of the wood, she can almost remember what it felt like to wake up in her sunny bedroom in their old house, socks whispering against the hardwood floors, the sound of the neighbors mowing their lawn next door. Before, Marcy always considered herself a morning person. In the new world, some things disappeared right away. This went slowly, so slowly she didn’t notice it at first. And then one day she was here, where getting out of bed feels like the hardest thing she’ll do all day, even more so because she knows it won’t be.

Marcy is grateful she established a routine early on. It takes all the thinking out of mornings now, to brush her teeth and work her hair into some kind of order with a wet comb, and rinse quickly and towel off before putting on something clean. Clean is important. As soon as they could manage, she began hauling their clothes to the creek to wash them. There’s no such thing as before-normal, but there’s now-normal, and if she ever wants to find Patrick, she needs to get as close to that as possible.

She doesn’t hear Clint outside either, but he left one of his homemade protein bars on the counter next to the basin they use for washing. He left a note too, scrawled on the back of a can wrapper and tucked under a blue spatterware plate.

_I’ve gone to find you a stag._

Marcy laughs, the sharp sound of it surprising her. He hasn’t made her laugh, or really she hasn’t let him, since they were stranded here.

When she was a resident working the night shift at Cedar Grove Regency Hospital, she would come home to breakfast on their cheap dishes, a paper tucked under the orange juice with a joke, a bit of encouragement, and sometimes just, _I’m ridiculously in love with you._

When they were living in the barn with his family, he would leave notes in places only she would find them. It helped. It was like a pact. The world may be unrecognizable, but this, what’s between them, is familiar and steady and comfortably worn.

She unfolds one of the camp chairs and eats her breakfast outside. It’s no cooler than the van, but it lets her keep an eye on the road. They pushed the hobbled van onto a gravel drive that belonged to a large farm, the buildings reduced to rubble. A windbreak of pines provides a bit of camouflage, but it hardly matters. They’ve only seen one person pass by in the eight months they’ve been here.

When Marcy is feeling masochistic, she imagines Patrick walking east around the bend in the road, catching sight of the van, and then her. She imagines him running the rest of the way into her arms. She imagines it now.

After breakfast, she goes to work in the garden. She already lost a few of the peas this year, and the corn isn’t looking good. She has to weed and pick off any pests and fine, she’ll admit it, hide. When she’s working in the garden, Clint tends to leave her alone.

Clint will find her sometime around dinner, usually when Marcy is hitting her limit for the day. Clint will make dinner over the firepit, and Marcy can’t call it charity, not completely, because at one point they exchanged vows to do this kind of thing. Even when they’re mad at each other.

Marcy isn’t sure if they’re still mad, or if the breakfast bar and note means they’re somewhere past that. She knows Clint feels awful that their attempts to leave keep getting thwarted. Even before the van, Greg broke his foot, and they’d stayed an extra four months, two months longer than she wanted to, waiting for him to heal.

“You’re our only doctor,” Clint said through gritted teeth as they argued. “He needs you. He’s my brother, Marce. We can’t just—” He couldn’t finish.

She glared at him, puffing up on her tiptoes as tall as she could. “And what if your son needs me?”

He winced at _your son._ “Ray has been preparing for years. He’s probably better off than we are.”

Her tears burned hot and Clint gathered her close. “You know I’ll go. We’ll go. As soon as we can.”

They did go eventually, but without the van, they lack the resources or the supplies to keep going on foot, so she’s still mad at him. Really, she’s mad at herself. Her heart should be immune to this feeling of being skewered every time she remembers how they ended up here, so far away from where they were supposed to be. Some days she feels numb to almost everything else, but not that. Never that. There is no shaking the clawing sense that this isn’t where she belongs, that it’s her own fault they’re here.

If it weren’t for the ache in her back, gardening would help. Even as it reminds her that they’ve put literal roots somewhere they never planned to be, it gives her something to do besides fester in anger and disappointment. The first time she planted seeds in this garden, she smoothed the dirt back over them and studied her own hands. Flakes and grains of soil clung to her fingers, and she found herself surprisingly moved by the sight of it, of the new world coating hands that were still learning how to live in it.

With her hands and knees in the dirt, she feels like she’s in charge of something. It’s not unlike healing the human body. It’s often frustrating, but with observation and knowledge, enough patterns emerge to dampen the mystery. It’s the first part of this new, horrible world she encounters that she can master.

Just like with treating patients, failure is devastating. Today, it’s the corn, stunted and browning. But unlike everything else that’s devastating about this world, she knows where to start again, has a list of things she can do differently. The comfort that comes from knowing that there is a way, a path around failure, paved by trial and error, is really the only thing about gardening that is not easily quantified.

The other benefit of the garden is that it makes her feel closer to Patrick. When Patrick moved to take the job with Ray, he would call home once a week like clockwork. She’d update him on their friends and neighbors, and Clint would talk about the local sports teams and his ongoing feud with Sean at work. Then Clint would beg off to clean the gutters or something and Marcy would talk to him for another hour or more. Often, maybe too often, they talked about work. 

Patrick was different, after he moved away from them. From Rachel. With his move, they interacted less and talked more, and she could see the shift more clearly. She hoped that by talking about little things, they might eventually work up to bigger things.

He most liked to talk about the greenhouses at Ray’s research labs. About the beetles infesting the experimental cabbage, the way Ray’s pack of scientists were sourcing and genetically modifying seeds to resist pests and tolerate lower light levels, less water, more heat.

He started his own garden too, and complained that the peas were getting too much sun after the neighbor had taken down a pair of cottonwoods. Sometimes she would put him on speaker while she went through the mail or did the crossword, the sound of his voice comforting. Shame rockets up her spine when she thinks of it now, that she didn’t savor those long conversations, didn’t sit in rapt attention.

Marcy never much liked to garden. But when Patrick was a boy, he would sit with her mom in her big backyard garden and listen to her chatter about which flowers deterred rabbits and attracted pollinators. He always had plants in his various apartments. Maybe green thumbs skip a generation.

She’s hoping not, though, because this garden is hers, because the seeds were hers, because Patrick sent them to her. The seeds came with two books and several hand-written instructions. They were the best, most resilient varieties from Ray’s experiments. “You can’t tell anyone. I mean it. I—I need you to promise,” he said, his eyes big and round and intent on the video call. She promised.

Marcy finishes the weeding and wipes her hands and face on an old shirt. The seeds have saved their lives. They brought their rations of shelf-stable food with them, but now, not knowing how long they’ll be stuck here, they need to stretch all their food as long as possible. The garden is buying them time.

What she wouldn’t give to be able to call him now. Not even for gardening advice, although it would be nice to swap stories. Mostly, she just wants to hear his voice. Wants to hear the way he almost-swears when he’s annoyed with something, and his throaty laugh, and the way he says, “Hello,” at the beginning and, “Bye, I love you,” at the end, always in the same soft cadence. She hopes the last time they talked she didn’t mumble it back halfway to hanging up, like a habit, or worse, an afterthought. She wishes she could remember.

 _Be okay, Patrick,_ she pleads, looking southwest across the open field outside the garden fence. She shuts her eyes against the hot tears threatening to spill. Then she opens them and lets them fall. “Sometimes gardens don’t do what you want,” her mother used to say. “But they need water. No reason you can’t water them with your tears.”

It’s just the corn, she tries to reassure herself. The rest looks good. Everything is fine. They’ll find a way to keep going. It’s just the corn.

* * *

She reads a book in the fading, smoky light. When they first explored the property, they found a box of old _Reader’s Digest_ condensed books in the cellar of the abandoned farmhouse, the only part of it still standing, and Marcy is working her way through them slowly. A few feet away, Clint roasts his latest catch over a fire in a metal ring they fashioned from part of a culvert. Jokes about stags aside, it’s been easier to find fish than large game, and they don’t really have a way to process or store it anyway.

“How many of those books d’you have left?” Clint asks, scratching at the back of his neck. Marcy recognizes the tone and the gesture. Clint gets restless when the silence stretches too long, which it’s wont to do in this supernatural quiet. Especially now that it’s just the two of them. Especially now that they’re fighting again. Still.

“Not sure. Five or six.” She turns the page, although she’s no longer reading.

“Wow. That didn’t take long.”

Marcy looks up at him over the frames of her reading glasses and his jaw tightens. “Feels long to me.”

He nods. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to remind you of . . .” He waves the fork he’s using to cook as if to encompass all of their present situation.

“Remind me? As if I’m not thinking about it all the time,” she snaps.

Clint hands her a plate with the perch and a few grilled carrots. “I know.”

They eat in stony silence near the fire. Her camp chair is uneven on the pitted gravel and she doesn’t bother to adjust it.

Marcy wonders if Clint would leave her if he could, if they weren’t stuck here together. He doesn’t know how to talk to her anymore, and she doesn’t blame him. She’s irritable and tired and sore and panicked. They’ve always been a team. When one of them was struggling, the other stepped in and made everything okay. Now that it’s not possible to make everything okay, they’ve forgotten how to move around each other.

“You know I think about him all the time, too, right?”

Marcy sets her fork on her plate and looks at him. “It doesn’t seem like it.”

Clint furrows his brow and dabs his mouth on a handkerchief before tossing it on the ground. “Of course I do, dammit. He’s—He’s my son.”

“Then why are we still here?”

“Haven’t I been trying to find us a way out?”

He has, of course he has. He hunts strategically, a different direction each time, looking for any signs of other people.

Clint takes a deep breath and tries to lower his voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t buy an extra battery for the van. I didn’t know we would be stuck in that barn for so long.”

“If it wasn’t that, it would probably be something else. Clint, let’s go on foot. With whatever we can carry.”

She’s expecting the same arguments. They have too far to go, and no way to carry enough food or water with them. They would have to follow the creeks and rivers which would take them off the roads to who knows where. They don’t know what areas are even livable, or what else they might encounter along the way. A storm or two is guaranteed, and even from the shelter of the old farm cellar, the storms are harrowing.

He doesn’t say any of that though. “Do you know every morning I take a walk? And every morning I think about coming back and saying, ‘Baby, fuck it. Let’s just go.’” He grinds his teeth as he watches his own hand trace the stitching on the arm of the camp chair. He looks up finally, eyes dark black in the fading light. “I imagine the way you would look at me, like I’ve finally stopped disappointing you. I’d do almost anything for you to look at me like that. Except the one thing I know would kill us.”

Marcy bites back a reply that is too sharp, unfair, and uncharitable. He’s trying to break the pattern, so she can too.

“Marcy, if we disappear in the woods on a trip we never should have made, he’ll never know what happened to us.”

Marcy pushes her plate away and drops head into her arms. She’s so tired of crying. So tired of feeling vulnerable and afraid and out of control.

“I think part of me knows you’re right, and the rest of me hates you for it,” she says, her voice raw.

Clint makes a heavy sound in his throat and takes her plate over to the basin to clean it.

Marcy isn’t sure how much time passes before she feels his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m going to sleep outside tonight. Give you some space,” he says.

When she says nothing, he squeezes her shoulder and disappears into the van to get ready for bed.

Once, when Patrick was six or seven, Clint spent two nights in the guest bedroom. They’d been fighting about her long hours. About whether that was contributing to Patrick’s troubles with some other kids at school. About whether they should cancel their vacation to Vancouver because money was tight. About how money was tight because Clint quit his job at the city planner’s office without talking to her about it first. She stayed mad, but eventually, the missing of him won out. Marcy slept restlessly both nights she was alone.

On the third night, she brushed her teeth, went into the guest room, kissed him goodnight, and then just didn’t stop kissing him.

“I’m still mad at you,” she said, pulling his t-shirt up and his boxers down.

“Funny way of showing it,” he teased, combing his fingers through her hair so he could still see her face as she lowered herself.

She shrugged and made quick work of him. “Come to bed,” she said when she was finished, kissing him gently.

And he did. They talked the next morning, more calmly. Reset their expectations. And after that, even when they were arguing about something, they slept in the same bed.

Tonight, as she finishes getting ready for bed, she can see Clint through the windshield sitting on one corner of the tarp, staking it down with a mallet. Another stake is tucked between his teeth.

She opens the door and calls, “Need some help?”

He startles and rubs at his eyes frantically. “I’ve got it,” he says, which she ignores. When she gets closer, she can see he’s been crying.

“I don’t want space,” she whispers, crawling into his lap.

He looks at her, and she can read his soft smile even in the darkness. “I think you do.”

“Okay I do. But that doesn’t mean you should give it to me. You might get bitten by rabid wolves or something, and it might not seem like it right now, but that would make me very sad.”

She reaches for him, slowly enough that he can dodge her touch if he wants to, and wipes away the tears with her thumbs. She hasn’t seen Clint cry since his parents died. Some part of her has known he cares this much, but it helps fill the cracks between them to see evidence of it.

His voice is thick when he says, “I don’t think there are wolves here.”

“Maybe not. Still.”

He sighs and looks at her. He looks older and tired. She probably does too. There isn’t a proper mirror in the van, which is maybe for the best. He tucks her hair behind her ear.

“I want to be able to fix this for you, Marcy. But I just keep making it worse.”

“You do,” she says kindly, and he laughs, a wet, snotty huff into her shoulder. She bends her mouth to his ear. “So do I. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” he says, his arms closing around her.

It’s been too long since they’ve really touched each other. His arms fit themselves around her until she’s snug and safe. It’s too hot for this; she doesn’t care.

He holds her and holds her. This still, this close, their heartbeats fill the silent void around them with their gentle, determined rhythm.

After a while, he takes her face in his hands. “Normally I find your stubbornness very sexy,” he says lightly. “But you have to stop blaming yourself. And you have to stop blaming me.”

“I don’t blame you,” she says.

“Marcy.”

She can feel the denial rising up again, a reflex more than the truth. “Okay,” she whispers.

“I promise you, with everything I have, that we will find him. But you have to promise me that you’ll be patient. We have to make a plan—a real one that can work—together.”

“I’m not very patient.”

“I know. Normally that’s sexy as well. But in this case, I need you to try.”

Marcy rolls her eyes and grabs his wrists to pry his hands from her face so she can kiss him. It’s been too long since they did that, too. His mouth is warm on hers, curved in a soft smile.

“Come to bed,” she says as she slides off his lap and attempts to pull them both up with an undignified grunt. He laughs at her and gives her a helpful shove. They abandon the tarp half-staked on the brittle grass.

He turns to her in their bed and offers, “I could rub your back for a bit.”

She shakes her head. “Just,” she pauses, nudging her way under his arm to rest a head on his chest, “hold me.”

“Okay,” he murmurs against her hair and tugs her closer.

“What do you think Patrick is doing right now?” she asks.

“Probably sleeping.”

“You know what I mean.”

“He said if they went into the bunkers he would be training people right? Helping to transition back to life above ground when the time came?”

“Yeah.” Marcy smiles at the thought of it, Patrick with chalk in his hand teaching people how to garden and build fire and who knows what else. She always thought he’d make a good teacher. Patient, present, quick to offer encouragement, but not too much of a pushover.

“I wonder if they’ve started.”

“Probably not. He said they have five years of rations. Rock climbing walls and swimming pools and lounges for movies and games. I can’t imagine anyone would leave that to come back to this before they have to.”

“Hmm.” His tone is neutral, thoughtful.

“What? Can you?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “Especially after those years in the barn.”

“Two years, seven months, and five days,” she says. He makes an odd sound, somewhere between a laugh and a groan.

“Anyway I don’t think I would like it, being trapped underground. No matter how comfortable it was. Or how bad it was up here. As long as it was liveable.”

She nods and burrows her face in his chest. “Do you think he’s worried about us?”

Clint’s chest rises and falls with his sigh. “Yes.”

“Me too.”

“Honey? Can I ask you a question that’s . . . just a question? I promise I’m not trying to—”

“Just ask it.”

“Patrick knows we were planning to go to Ashville if we didn’t get out in time. What if he comes looking for us after we’ve already left?”

“I thought of that.”

“It would be easier for us to get back there on foot than to push west. We could wait for him.”

“I know. It’s just. I can’t stop thinking that if he had a way to get there, he already would have.”

“He’s so like you, though,” Clint says. It’s hard to tell in the darkness, but it sounds like a compliment. “If someone needs him, I think he’d stay.”

* * *

Clint sweeps his long hunting knife back and forth across the path from the van to their favorite spot under a big oak tree, clearing brush out of the way. The trail is overgrown and scrubby, except for the little bit of it that traverses the ruins of the old farmhouse. They piled as many of the extra stones as they could around the intact cellar to reinforce it during storms.

The grasses would probably flatten under their thick, rubber soles, but she suspects Clint likes the feel of stabbing and slashing at the air around him anyway, to move with violence through its stifling and charred weight. The air and the grass are gracious victims, bearing the brunt of his frustration at the thousand compounding factors that stranded them here, too enormous to attack en masse, too amorphous to target individually.

The tree seems fuller than the last time they came here, the air under it mercifully cooler. “Fucking show-off,” Clint mutters to the tree. So. To no one. Marcy covers her smile in a cough. He’s in a bit of a mood today, which is amusing and adorable.

They’ve been doing this at least once a week for the last few months since they agreed to make peace with being stuck here for a little while. To make peace with each other. There isn’t anywhere to go, no restaurants or movie theaters or even a park, so this tree has become their unofficial date spot.

It feels silly to have a date when they only ever see each other, but there’s something to be said for the effort of it. The intention of it. It’s easy to feel like partners. They need each other to survive. But it’s nice, sometimes, to also feel married.

Once they’ve settled down on the blanket, the quiet hangs heavy around them. She still hasn’t really gotten used to it, how quiet it is now. No traffic, no neighbors, no breeze to rustle through the trees, no sunshine to bring the animal world to life. Just everywhere a low, eerie hush. Like everything, everywhere is waiting to catch a break, too.

“Do you remember the woods at the end of our block? How Patrick used to call them the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood?” she asks, turning her head on the blanket to look at Clint.

“Of course. I spent many a long summer afternoon in search of Rabbit’s house.”

“Why do you think Rabbit was his favorite? Was it the gardening?”

“I always assumed it was his preference for people with strong opinions. Gets that from me I think.” Clint waggles his eyebrows like bait.

Marcy smiles and doesn’t bite. “Remember when he built that heffalump trap in our backyard?”

“That’s right,” Clint says. “Spent two days digging that trap so it was just like Winnie-the-Pooh’s. Didn’t someone trip in it?”

“Me!” she says. “I sprained my knee. Taught him four new curse words on the spot, too.”

“That’s right.” Clint’s laugh bursts out of him, the sound crackling across the field. It startles a pair of crows out of the tree above them, and they flap off in annoyance.

“Huh,” Clint says, watching them go. “I can’t remember the last time I saw birds actually flying through the sky.”

“Me either,” Marcy says. The crows vanish into a distant stand of trees and the earth is silent again. “Do you think it means anything?”

“I don’t know,” Clint says softly. “Maybe something good is coming.” He looks at her, warm eyes and an impish smile that he presses to her lips.

“I know what you’re doing,” she says, laughing and pulling him closer, tucking her hands under his belt.

“What am I doing?” he asks between kisses to her cheek, her neck, her shoulder.

She tugs the front of his shirt out of his pants and starts to unbutton it. “Trying to seduce me in broad daylight.”

He tips his head back and squints at the murky sky. “I dunno. Would we call this broad daylight?”

Laughing, she pulls him in with a handful of his shirt until she finds her way to his mouth again and his hands find their way everywhere she wants them.

They’re interrupted by a startling cacophony from the road, just out of sight. Whatever it is, it’s moving fast. Marcy rushes to button up her shirt and Clint tucks himself back into his pants.

They crouch just above the spear of the long blades of grass, watching the bend in the road. Waiting. A cow emerges, pulling a good-sized wagon. A few wood and metal tools are hanging off the side rails, thumping and clanging against the wood boards. Behind the wagon walks a tall, thin man in a wide-brimmed hat.

He whistles to the cow when he sees the van. It pulls up and waits for further instructions. A knowing look passes between her and Clint. They didn’t lock up any of their things.

They offered dinner to the only other person they've seen. She stayed the night on a mat on the floor of the van, and they woke up the following morning to find they were short their solar-powered flashlight, the handful of painkillers Marcy kept in the drawer under the kitchen counter, and all of the potatoes they’d harvested from the garden the day before. It could have been much worse.

They crouch lower as the man squats to hold his hands over the firepit, perhaps to judge if it’s been recently used. It clearly has been; he stands to survey the surrounding land. She watches him intently, trying to determine whether he might pose a threat. Her heart is in her throat, a strange feeling when they’ve grown so used to being at the mercy of outside forces. It’s indicative of how disordered things are, that the prospect of danger seems preferable to monotony, if only because fear seems preferable to boredom. A brain operating on fear can give the wheel to instinct. Boredom is a never-ending cycle of think and rethink.

“Hey there!” Clint says, standing up to get the man’s attention.

“Clint!” Marcy whispers in a way that she hopes conveys how in trouble he is going to be in if his instincts fail them.

“Oh hello,” the man says, issuing some kind of command to his animal to stay put while he walks toward them. Marcy stands up too. If they’re doing this, this man should know right away that he’s outnumbered. She hopes her clothing doesn’t look like they’ve been rolling around in a field.

“Something we can help you with?” Clint asks.

“Oh no. Didn’t even expect to find folks out this way. I’m Colin. Murray.”

“Clint. And this is my wife, Marcy.”

“Pleased to meet you both. Oh, and where are my manners? That’s Winifred.” He points vaguely at the cow, whose ears twitch at her name.

Colin is tall—he has a few inches on Clint—and rangy. He looks older than he probably is, the grime accentuating the lines in his face and hands.

“What brings you this way, Colin?”

“Ah yes. See I’m an apiarist. I’m going to check on a colony of bees I helped establish in a town a ways west of here. I heard from the last folks that there was a storm coming. Turned down this road hoping to find a place to weather it.”

Clint looks at Marcy, and she looks back at him with raised eyebrows. “And where are you coming from?”

“Willow Glen. Just a few folks there, me included. I’m trying to work my way west to Elm Falls. Do you know it?”

Clint reaches for Marcy and squeezes her hand. “We know it. Our son was working just an hour or so from there. Elmdale.” Marcy and Clint don’t actually know where the bunkers are, just that Ray’s headquarters, where Patrick was handling all of the inquiries from prospective residents and managing the acquisition of supplies, was in downtown Elmdale. They were supposed to meet him there for transport to the bunkers themselves, about an hour farther away by car.

Colin’s face turns serious. “When were you last in touch with him?”

Clint says, “Three years ago,” while Marcy says, “The tenth of June.”

“It’s just that I met someone from Elmdale a few months back. It’s her that I’m headed to see now, actually. Said everyone’s gone from there.”

Marcy clamps down on Clint’s hand with such force that he yelps.

“G-gone?” Marcy asks.

“Oh, no, sorry. Sorry, sorry,” Colin says, waving his hands. “I don’t know what happened. Probably just abandoned.” Colin wrings his hands and frowns at them, doing his best to look apologetic. “I’m sorry, truly. It’s my daughter in Elm Falls. I know how hard it is to be apart.”

Marcy hasn’t let go of Clint’s hand, has barely loosened her grip. He presses his nails into the back of her hand in return. “We’ve got extra for dinner if you’re hungry.”

Colin’s shoulders sag with relief. “If you don’t mind sharing your extra, I would be so grateful.”

“Not a problem,” Clint says.

Colin goes to get the wagon and Clint looks at Marcy with widened eyes.

“He’s on his way to see someone from Elmdale,” she says, as softly as she can. “He knows the area. He has a wagon.”

Clint looks at her with a raised brow, but the smile is tickling the corner of his mouth. “What about what he said though? That everyone’s gone?”

“I don’t know,” she says, the momentary panic at the word _gone_ rising up again. She tries to unclench her fists.

Colin returns, saying, “I have honey with me. I’d love to offer some in return for your kindness.” _Honey._ Her mouth salivates at the thought of it. She almost laughs to herself. It’s reassuring that her body is responsive and hungry for the fruits of the world tattered as it is. Tattered as she feels.

“I’m just going to pull some carrots for dinner,” Marcy says, and exchanges another look with Clint as she excuses herself.

It’s been more than three years of too few options, too late to every opportunity, too much to overcome since they left Cedar Grove. And now, finally, something is shifting in their favor.

She can hear Clint talking to Colin, his big laugh and warm smile. He has put on his charm-the-PTA voice. By the time they tuck themselves into bed, he’ll know Colin’s whole life story. He’ll know whether they can trust him. And hopefully, if they can trust him, they’ll find a way to ask to go with him. She’s been patient for so long. She can wait a few hours more.


	3. They can carry me

If Marcy Brewer were the type to admit Clint occasionally gets it right (which she’s not), she would agree that Clint was right about not setting off on foot alone. Colin’s wagon, pulled by the dutiful Winifred, gives them enough room for provisions and lets them stay closer to the main roads where they are more likely to find shelter. With their belongings, there’s no room to ride, but it’s so much better than nothing. Colin has done a fair amount of traveling locally, and has contacts at least as far as Thornbridge. He knows how to stay safe on the road, how to navigate and plan ahead and read the stifling air for oncoming weather. They wouldn’t have made it through the first week without him.

Colin made camp for himself next to the van and stayed for two weeks, replenishing his own energy reserves as they made a plan. Marcy harvested and canned as much as she could and tried to condense their belongings to bring as much as possible with them.

They could get there faster by cutting through the woods, Colin says, but he’d rather stick to the roads. This world is stingy with everything but time. Time stretches out before them, endless days where progress is divorced from survival, the scales tipped so heavily toward luck, and if you’re lucky, kindness. Colin is kind. They are lucky.

Colin steers Winifred around the most treacherous places in the roads, reduced as they are to cracked and shifted pavement. The pack chafes against her shoulders and hips. She alternates the bandana between her forehead and her mouth, trying to keep sweat from her eyes and smoke-tinged air from her lungs. The pavement is hot against Marcy’s unaccustomed feet. Sometimes she walks through the grass overtaking the gravel shoulder for relief. 

The shoulder isn’t shadier—shadows don’t exist under the gloom of the never-ending cloud cover—but it’s more sheltered, the trees and stone outcroppings nestled along the curves of the old highway making her feel less prone. The landscape is wild in a way it wasn’t before. Not lush. Not vibrant. Not even close. But wild. Soot-smeared and dusty, breaking open the concrete and stone surfaces of the old world in a stubborn attempt to be, in whatever state it can manage. Content to be less than its former splendor in exchange for existing at all.

The walk is long, tedious, and often boring. They talk with Colin but it’s hard to sustain a long conversation with the exertion and air quality. So she’s left to the conversations from her past life that float through her brain in bits and pieces, sometimes dragging unexpected emotions along behind them. An email she forgot to reply to and an accompanying wave of regret. Patrick breaking up with Rachel for the first time and the powerlessness she felt, now that he had his own grown-up problems she couldn’t solve. Clint telling her once that she had moxie like it was a perfectly normal word to come out of his suburban dad mouth, and the way she’d blushed with delight even as she laughed at him.

Sometimes she gets one verse of a song stuck but can’t remember the rest of it, and the three of them will try to hum and piece lyrics together in hopes it will leave her alone. Once, she remembered that she never saw the last three episodes of the _Banshees on a Plane_ adaptation on Interflix, and spent the day brainstorming with Clint about how the producers might have wrapped up the increasingly-wild story arcs.

Nothing that happens in her brain on the road makes sense. And the only thing that keeps her sane is that until they reach another town, another person, nothing really has to.

They’ve been away from home for three years. In the barn, surrounded by a family she married into, the loneliness was crippling. Out here, they likely won’t see another person for at least a week as they get closer to the next town. Somehow, the loneliness is easier to accept without people to remind her. She feels a kinship with the scrubby weeds coursing down the cracks in the old highway. She takes a break for water, looks up at the sky, and squints out of habit more than need. _Just try and stop us,_ she thinks, looking defiantly at the matte gray nothing.

By now, they can make camp on autopilot. They stop in a small clearing along a nameless creek. Clint starts the fire while Colin unfurls the canvas and mesh they’ve fashioned into a tent and Marcy lays out the tarp and blankets underneath it. They share mixed nuts and dried strawberries from their stash of provisions and Colin hoists the rest of the food into the air with a rope to keep scavengers from getting into it. Colin whistles tunelessly by the fire while Clint rubs some menthol cream on Marcy’s back to ease the ache at the base of her spine.

The tent is cramped with all three of them, the roof close enough for her to touch. She tries to unfocus her eyes so she can see through the mesh to the murky night beyond, waiting for fatigue to take over. In the shelter of the tent, she feels less prone to sporadic thinking. She makes a list, one crisis at a time, of everything that can go wrong. Problem, inhale, solution, exhale. It’s something she learned when she was newly practicing, sneaking in a nap on breaks in the OR. It soothes her. As frustrating as these last few years have been, she’s alive because of contingency plans. Marcy breathes and catastrophizes until finally, sleep takes over, and all her potential problems fade to a temporary nothing.

They huddle around the fire in the morning, baking thin-sliced yams on Colin’s cast-iron skillet and drizzling honey on them. When it’s time to leave, Marcy cringes as her pack settles heavily on her shoulders, activating skin already weary and worn from several days of travel. She tightens Clint's straps, he tightens hers, and they set off.

Clint is apparently feeling chatty. He asks Colin more about how he went from computer science to bee keeping.

“I just found it quite fascinating. And not unrelated,” he says, turning to talk to Clint as they walk, his passion for his work animating him from head to toe. “A bee’s methods of finding food are almost algorithmic. Sort of like a Google search.” He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes at the sweat darkening his hairline.

Winifred stops to snuff at a patch of grass and then sneezes into it.

“Good girl,” Colin says when she starts moving again. “Anyway, the thing about bees,” Colin continues, “and about nature in general really, is that it is simultaneously a perfectly calibrated, highly specific system, and yet it’s incredibly adaptable. You couldn’t design something like that if you tried. I mean, to think you can take something as intricate as a hive and transport it to this hellscape and it still works? If the bees can do it, we can do it, you know? I find that very hopeful.”

“I’m glad,” Marcy says, just to be agreeable. From her point of view, there’s too much uncertainty for anything more than cautious optimism. It’s not that she thinks they’re doomed. She’s just convinced they’ll have to wring survival out of this world with their bare hands. It’s not as simple as putting a few pieces in place and letting nature run its course.

“You’ll see,” Colin says, his smile contagious.

As they walk, he keeps talking about everything he’s learned since he started traveling around. He’s making his way to Elm Falls in a roundabout way, attempting to help small settlements attract and establish bee colonies so people can harvest their own honey, make products out of beeswax, and hopefully make it easier to pollinate gardens.

“Like a Johnny Appleseed for bees?” Clint says.

“Oh no. Just an old man trying to do some good on the way to his daughter,” Colin says.

Marcy is only half listening, but the gentle rise and fall of his voice is comforting. It’s nice to be around someone new. The one thing that does give her hope is people like Colin finding a sense of purpose now, learning to do something completely different than they did before, and finding meaning in it. Joy in it.

Colin and his bee-related facts get them all the way to their stopping point for the night. It’s the farthest they’ve traveled in a single day, and Marcy can feel the extra distance in her joints. Colin tells them to focus on dinner while he sets up camp.

When he finishes, he stands up and brushes his hands against his thighs, inspecting his own job well done. “Not as simple as checking into a motel, but not so difficult either, is it?” he asks with a self-satisfied grin.

Marcy nods and smiles back, the curve of her mouth pulling at muscles as weary from disuse as her shoulders and thighs. Maybe Colin is right. Maybe adaptability is a reason for hope.

* * *

Colin ties Winifred’s lead to a bollard in front of an abandoned hardware store on the outskirts of Twin Pines. The first thing Marcy notices is the buzzing, a kind of dull whine that fills the ever-present silence.

“That’ll be the bees,” Colin says, smiling. “The hive is on the roof. They sound lovely, don’t they.”

“They’re loud,” Clint says, looking at Colin with surprise.

“Colin! I was hoping that was you!” a young woman says, waving at them from the corner of the building.

“Ah, yes I’m sorry. It took me ages to get here. But look, I made some friends. Marcy, Clint, this is Tennessee.”

They make introductions and Tennessee invites them inside for dandelion tea with honey and biscuits. The biscuits are brittle and flat, but still a welcome change from small game and forraged fruit on the road.

Tennessee, Colin reminds them, is from Elmdale originally. When Tennessee learns who Marcy and Clint are, her eyes go wide.

“You’re Patrick’s parents,” she says. She looks at Colin and swallows, and Marcy’s heart sinks.

Marcy looks at her hands in her lap as Clint covers them with his own broad palm, his thumb sweeping back and forth along her knuckles. “What do you know?” she says. “I have to know.”

“I used to work for Ray, too. Patrick was supposed to be in Bunker 10 with us.”

Marcy nods. This she knows already. Patrick sent her floorplans of the suite they were supposed to share. “Yes. Ray offered us a larger unit if I would offer my medical skills. But we didn’t make it in time.”

“Yeah.” Tennessee just shakes her head and pulls her arms in closer to her body. Marcy has had to deliver enough bad news as a doctor that some part of her knows what’s coming. “That’s—I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you, but Patrick never made it either.”

“What do you mean he never made it?”

“I mean they ended up giving it to some family that was on the waitlist.”

Marcy is too stunned to speak or cry or scream, although she’d love to do all three. Colin places a warm hand on their shoulders. “Would he have stayed in a different bunker perhaps, once his parents wouldn’t be joining him? Aren’t there at least four of them?” Colin’s voice is steady, and Marcy is so grateful for him.

Tennessee nods. “Bunker 8 was where most of the staff lived if they didn’t have families with them. It’s possible. But.” She looks at Marcy, who must look as overwhelmed as she feels, and seems uncertain if she should go on.

“They need to know, dear,” Colin says gently.

“Patrick was kind of a big deal. Like, we used to joke that he was Ray’s right hand and half of his brain. I don’t think Ray would have made him move just to save some space. They were close.”

“And you never saw Patrick once you left the bunker?” Clint asks.

“No. But I didn’t stick around. As soon as we came upstairs, I decided to work my way east. I’m a decent hunter and thought I’d take my chances. We’d been down there so much longer than we were supposed to be and I just wanted out of the operation entirely.”

This time, it’s Clint who starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he says, rubbing angrily at his eyes.

“I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you,” Tennessee says.

Marcy feels all the progress, all the hope, all the tentative plans they’ve made over their journey crumble at her feet. Knowing Patrick is safe is what made it possible to accept him being so far away. But if he never made it, if he set off to find them, or got stuck somewhere, or worse, she might never know.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to,” Tennessee says. “I’ve got a makeshift shower rigged up out back. Why don’t you go clean up and I’ll make us something for dinner?”

“I think I’ll go on a little walk,” Colin says. “See if anyone else has heard anything helpful.”

“You could try the old elementary school,” Tennessee says. “People have been posting missing persons requests and other news.”

“I will, thank you,” Colin says.

Once they've cleaned up, word travels fast that Marcy is a doctor, and then she has three people lined up to see her. She does her best to treat their ailments, and tries to listen. Sometimes listening is all she can do. Sometimes it works better than medicine. When she finishes with them, she decides to write their names in a notebook in case someday it might be useful to have a list of people that she’s helped.

Colin comes back from his walk as she's wrapping up with the last patient.

“Anything?” Clint asks.

He shakes his head. Nothing.

* * *

That night, Marcy changes out of her road clothes with a sigh. She’s hoping the simple act of changing into sleep clothes will help her feel more civilized, a little less feral.

“Talk to me,” Clint says, kissing the curve where her neck meets her shoulder.

“I don’t know what to say,” she says. She’s starting to feel stranded. They’ve come too far to turn back, and now, after grilling Tennessee for everything she knows, Marcy is no longer confident that they’ll be any closer to Patrick when they reach their destination.

“I know. C’mere.” His hand is warm on her belly, the hairs on his chest tickling her back as he pulls her closer.

For the past year or so, they’ve gone to bed talking about Patrick. Sometimes they share a story, trying to keep all their memories of him from disappearing into the voided world. More often, they imagine what he’s up to. If he’s working (probably). If he’s dating (probably not). If he’s happy (hopefully).

“Where do you think he is?” Her voice quivers, but she needs the habit even though she’s terrified of the real answer. This whole time, they’ve assumed he’s safe, and the challenge is just to reach him. “He could be anywhere. He could be—"

“Shh, let’s not even say it,” Clint says, pulling her onto the bed with him. It’s warm against his body, and for once, she’s not too hot to appreciate it. The windows are open and if Marcy closes her eyes, she can almost imagine a gentle breeze. She realizes with a start that she’s not imagining it. When she opens her eyes, the curtains are fluttering ever-so-slightly on the rods.

“Clint, look,” she says. Normally, the air is too heavy to move without the most forceful of winds.

He looks and turns back to her. “Be nice if that sticks around,” he whispers, kissing her once on her cheek, again at her graying temples. “I miss cuddling you.”

“Mmm,” she agrees as she burrows back down next to him.

The breeze is refreshing, but it stirs up her questions, too, about where to go from here. She doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.

* * *

They decide to continue on with Colin at least until Thornbridge, where Tennessee says there is a decent settlement. She sends them off with a few extra provisions, more honey, and mead for trading.

“Find the Morrisons,” she told them. “They help travelers. If there’s something to know, they’ll know.” Tennessee called the Morrisons hobbyists, which Marcy took to mean that the Morrison Farm operates almost the same way as it did before everything changed, entirely off grid with its own modest power supply and water collection and filtration systems.

The weeks from Twin Pines to Thornbridge feel longer than the weeks before. They cross the empty land one foot in front of the other, and Marcy knows she should be grateful that nothing exciting happens. They have so little margin for error. There’s almost nothing they could encounter on the road that could be considered exciting without also being exceedingly dangerous. They hunt and make camp and take rest days and carry on.

Whenever they spend enough time somewhere for word to spread that a doctor is passing through, she is greeted with ailments and wounds and sprains, most of which could be treated with time. She treats them with medicine anyway and adds their names to her book. At a farm about thirty kilometers west of Twin Pines, she treats a woman who would have died without her medicine. She puts an asterisk next to _Maya Webster_ , who would not be alive if Marcy Brewer were safely where she was supposed to be.

When they finally get to Thornbridge, they find their way to the Morrison homestead easily enough, thanks to a painted sign that is bolted to one of the old highway exit markers. Nestled on a low hillside, its main house is surrounded by a collection of outbuildings, several barns, and two other small houses. They have a vast garden, a few dairy cows, a robust chicken coop, and, much to Colin’s delight, several beehives.

The eldest Morrison introduces himself and then the whole extended family gathers their traveling party up in their tide and sweeps them into the house. They’re sat at the kitchen table with tea they’ve warmed over the central hearth, and their life story is dragged out of them one anecdote at a time. By this point, Colin, Marcy, and Clint have a rhythm down when it comes to who tells what part of the story of how they met, where they’re going.

The Morrisons tell stories in return, and Marcy sips her tea while she listens, unaccustomed to the hum of joyful chatter. The Morrisons aren’t thriving—no one is thriving—but they’re happy anyway.

One of the children comes in—Marcy hasn’t yet figured out who goes with who—complaining about a scraped knee. Anna hauls him into her lap while Isaac looks for salve.

“In the other cupboard,” Anna says.

“Why is it always moving?” he gripes.

“Daddy!” the child complains, too impatient to wait for his parents to settle the logistics of first aid storage.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he says, and then kneels in front of the child with a basin of filtered water, a clean cloth, and a jar of something homemade and soothing looking.

“What is that?” Marcy asks.

“It helps the inflammation,” Anna says. “I can show you how to make it tomorrow, if you like?”

Marcy nods. She’s been doling out her stockpile of medications and ointments in a miserly fashion, wishing she’d learned more about homemade remedies. If Anna can teach her, it’s worth delaying their trip another day or two.

Marcy wants to ask if they’ve heard anything about Patrick, but it seems like in this crowd, someone is always talking. Her chest tightens at the memory of the barn, where three generations packed on top of each other always made it difficult to have a straightforward conversation.

“Marcy and Clint are searching for their son,” Colin says in the briefest lull, bless him. “He was supposed to be working for Ray Butani somewhere around Elmdale but there’s reason to believe he may have left.”

They’ve asked everyone they’ve met along the way, but other than Tennessee, no one seems to have seen or heard of Patrick. Everyone has heard of Ray Butani, who has developed a reputation of such mythic proportions that it’s hard to believe any of the news that’s been relayed about him is true.

“And you think he’s where, now?” asks the eldest Morrison.

Clint tells them what they know: that Patrick helped run Ray’s operations, that he was in his office in Elmdale when they last spoke to him, that Tennessee said he never moved into their suite in Bunker 10, that he was training to be a reentry coordinator once the bunkers were no longer needed. At that, Anna and her mother exchange glances.

“What? Does that mean something to you?” Marcy asks. The older woman nods and Anna sighs deeply.

“There was a man who came through a few months ago. Said he’d traveled several days with someone who worked with Ray Butani. That they parted ways in a place called Elm Valley.”

“What did he look like?” Marcy asked.

“Tall. Gray hair. Sharp features.”

“Kind of standoffish. Intense,” Isaac adds. “He creeped me out, honestly.”

Marcy shakes her head. That can’t be Patrick. But maybe they traveled together.

“Anyway,” Anna continues, “he said that he’d heard from this person he was traveling with that there had been an incident in one of the bunkers. That someone died and the reentry coordinator disappeared.”

“Do you know if there was more than one reentry coordinator?” Mr. Morrison asks Clint and Marcy with sympathetic eyes.

“No idea,” Clint says. He squeezes Marcy’s shoulder. She knows what he’s thinking. She’s been thinking it since they left Tennessee's. What if Patrick traveled through the woods and is knocking on the door of the barn near Ashville and they end up swapped, still a thousand miles apart?

“Maybe, if it is your son, he’s still there in Elm Valley,” Isaac says.

Marcy is barely following, trying not to cry from panic and fear, and overwhelmed by how nice they all are, how concerned for her family, how invested in helping them piece together what little they know.

“Is Elm Valley close to Elm Falls?” Clint asks Colin.

“I’ve only been once, before everything. My daughter drove me to the botanical gardens there. I think it was about an hour or two northwest.” Marcy quickly translates an hour into walking speed. A couple of days, probably, unless they get a lot more efficient. Maybe longer without Colin. By the time they get that far, Patrick might be long gone.

“Maybe someone will know more as you get closer,” Anna says, trying to be encouraging. She puts a hand on Marcy’s and smiles.

“Maybe,” she agrees.

Mrs. Morrison must sense that the Brewers are quickly running out of strength for this conversation. “How about I show you to your room?”

They don’t have an extra bed, but there’s a door and a mat on the floor that is not damp from the dirt and once the Morrisons have left they’re alone for the first time since they set out from Twin Pines. Monica knocks softly to deliver a basin of warm water and a couple of clean cloths, and Marcy and Clint use them to clean their skin.

“Should we go to Elm Valley, do you think? Or still toward what’s left of Elmdale?” Marcy asks as she wrings out the cloth and pulls on her sleep shirt.

“It’s hearsay,” Clint says, lowering himself onto the sleeping mat. “Several layers of it. We don’t even know if it’s him.”

“I know. It’s just. I want some good news. Why can’t someone say, ‘Oh, I know Patrick. Sweet guy. He’s healthy and happy and waiting for you right where he said he’d be,’?” She settles onto the sleeping mat without her usual wincing. Sleeping on the hard ground seems to have helped her back, now that she’s used to it. A small mercy.

“Fucking apocalypse,” he says. “Why does it have to be such a shit show, huh?”

It startles a laugh out of her. She turns in his arms and buries her face in his neck. These weeks on the road have hardened her. Or numbed her. She doesn’t feel as constantly on the verge of crying, but the capacity for joy has gone with it. Even though nothing about this whole fucked up situation is funny, it feels good to laugh.

“Tonight, I’m going to imagine him playing his guitar by a fire,” he says, more forcefully than usual, like he can will it.

“What’s he playing?” she asks.

“Leonard Cohen,” he says. “Or The Beatles. Or maybe ‘Cats in the Cradle.’ Too on the nose?”

“Yes,” Marcy says, frowning at him.

“Okay. Then he’s playing Leonard Cohen by a fire. Somewhere safe. And surrounded by people who love him.”

For once, she sees no harm in letting her hope run rampant. “I hope you’re right,” she says.

Clint smiles as he cups her cheek. “I’m always right.”


	4. Swear to be sturdy and strong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tim, an original character from my fic [Getting Over Getting Older All the Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21764128), has a cameo in this chapter because I missed writing him. Don't worry, it's just a cameo. He's not going to spend five years (or any amount of time) wedged between the OTP.

Colin releases Winifred from her yoke on the edge of an old nature preserve on the north edge of Elm Falls so she can graze. It’s nearly dark; they'll cover the rest of the distance into town tomorrow. There's an abandoned ropes course above them; Clint climbs up on one of the platforms to see if there are any cables left worth scavenging. He comes back empty-handed except for a carabiner.

They ate dinner with a family headed east and asked them about Colin’s daughter. It’s good news.

“Do you think you’ll go to her house first tomorrow?” Clint asks.

Colin nods. “Yes. I think so. Figure that’s as good a place as any to start. I’m sure you’d be welcome to stay as long as you need to while you ask around about your boy.”

“Thanks. We’ll see,” Clint says, eyes flicking to Marcy.

Everyone they’ve spoken to between Thornbridge and Elm Falls has given them different information. It’s a bit like the game of Telephone Patrick used to play with his cousins. They keep getting fragments that sound true, but nothing that makes sense all put together.

Most people agree that Ray’s bunkers are located somewhere south and/or east of Elmdale, which was decimated in a storm a year or two back and reduced to rubble. The perimeter was heavily-guarded but may not be anymore. Stories about the person who died in either Bunker 4 or 5 range from mutant creatures to good old fashioned heart attack, but they’re all sensationalized to a point that Marcy doesn’t know what to believe anymore. No one remembers the name of the man who disappeared, just that he worked for Ray and was last seen in Elm Valley or maybe Elm Glen. The fact that all the towns in the region apparently start with ‘Elm’ doesn’t help when it comes to gathering reliable intel. There seems to be someone by the name of Paul Brewer in Elm Valley, but he reportedly has a teenaged son.

Tomorrow, they’ll try again in Elm Falls.

“It will be strange to set off just the two of us,” Clint says. His voice thickens as his eyes find Marcy’s. “We never would have made it this far without you, Colin Murray.”

Colin nods. “I was glad for the company.” The corners of his long mouth flick upward in a smile before he turns back to the fire, deep in thought.

After a few minutes of comfortable silence, he speaks again. “It’s odd, isn’t it? When you raise them, you know someday they’ll end up far away from you. Even if they stay close by, they leave you one way or another. It’s the natural order of things." Marcy reaches out for his hand and squeezes it. He looks up at her and squeezes back, his eyes glistening in the firelight. “My friends told me I was crazy. That I wouldn’t make it here. Seemed a bit of a fool’s errand to me, too, going all this way just to know she’s okay. I’m . . . I thank you. I’m glad it was you in that field, even if I did interrupt your private time.”

Clint snorts and looks at Marcy, who can’t help but laugh too.

“Anyway you were the first folks I told who understood. It made me feel less foolish.”

Clint’s arm closes around her shoulders and she leans into it. “Us too,” she says.

* * *

Sienna opens the door at Colin’s knock and leaps into his arms, her tears mingling with the sweat on his shoulders. Her arms are wrapped as far around him as she can get them, her fingers fisting his plaid shirt.

Marcy can’t watch after that. She’s happy for Colin, but she doesn't know if she'll get this for herself. And that scares her.

“C’mere, honey,” Clint says, pulling her in. He presses his lips to her forehead and holds her close.

After some back-and-forth with his daughter, Colin moves to introduce them and they’re ushered in for buckwheat crepes. It took them most of the day to make the last push into town, and everyone is exhausted. After the meal, Marcy and Clint make camp in the living area, Clint on the sofa and Marcy on the loveseat.

“It’s been almost six years,” Clint says quietly. “Do you suppose he’s changed much?”

Marcy smiles. “I think about that every time I describe him to someone.”

“You’ve changed,” Clint says, looking at her in that way he has, like she’s a cubist painting and he’s assessing several angles of her at once.

“If you’re going to tell me I look older after we’ve walked for _a year_ on foot—”

“Oh no. I know better than that,” Clint says, his smile wide. “I just mean. Look, I would have been happy being old and domestic and boring with you in our little house in Cedar Grove until the end of time. That’s the dream, really. But I feel like . . . I don’t know. Then I would have missed this side of you.”

“What side of me?” she whispers, not sure she wants to know. “The side that’s always on edge and hyper-focused on an increasingly unattainable goal?”

“Well sure, that too,” he says, and his voice is so soft, so fond. “But I think what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t know I could love you this much.”

Marcy reaches out a hand for his; he grasps it across the space between them. “I love you this much, too.”

That night, when she dreams, it’s a timelapse. Patrick is young with a skinned knee eating a banana in the kitchen, a lonely tear tracking through the dirt on his cheek. Then he’s sitting on the porch swing with Rachel, wearing his baseball uniform. And then, faster and faster, he’s getting older, and she begins to lose the context so it’s just him in a blur of space. Lines form and deepen around his eyes, his mouth. Gray spreads across his hair, and then white as it thins. A rasp in his voice grows stronger with age, while a creak lances through his laugh. She wakes up feeling like she’s seen a ghost, and she isn’t sure if she should be happy or sad.

She still feels disoriented over breakfast, not eating much and sipping at the dandelion tea Sienna offers. They get more official introductions out of the way. Colin’s daughter is lovely. She is nearly as tall as he is, just as generous, and very sharp.

She listens to their story with that same sincerity Colin has, too, like she can take some of their sadness away just by nodding along and looking at them with those big, deep-set eyes.

“I have a map of the whole region,” Sienna says when they mention Elm Valley, standing up in a rush and digging through some papers on the bookshelf. “I scavenged it out of the Parks Services office.”

She opens it on the table and puts a button on Elm Falls. Then she puts a coin on the forest services-owned land south of Elmdale, where the bunkers are supposed to be, and a paper clip on Elm Valley.

“Elm Valley is the bigger settlement I think. I heard they are close to getting a low-voltage radio dispatch office up and running,” Sienna says.

“Do you think we should start there?” Clint asks.

“It depends,” she says. “There’s a medical facility there. A decent trade network. Even if he’s not there, you would be able to restock supplies and search by word of mouth. Maybe get a better idea of which direction to go next. The area around Elmdale is pretty desolate. If he’s not there, it would be harder to get to Elm Valley than the other way around.”

Clint looks at Marcy. She nods. “Let’s start in Elm Valley, then. Do you have a pen and paper? I’d like to make a copy of the map.”

“You can take it,” Sienna says, folding it up. “You need it more than I do.”

* * *

They plan to stay in Elm Falls until the end of the week, which will give them enough time to wash their clothes, rest up, and attempt to reduce their belongings to fit in the old shopping cart Sienna found for them behind an abandoned grocery store.

They’re picking through the piles and arguing about what to discard, when Clint stands up to wipe sweat from his forehead and freezes.

“What? What’s wrong?” she asks, looking behind her.

He just points up the alley between the vacant buildings. On its way to the horizon, the sun has broken through the lowest clouds, and for a minute, the world looks vibrant orange and red and green in a way it hasn’t in years.

“Get Colin and Sienna,” Clint says.

She runs, calling them, and grabs their hands to pull them into the alley. When they come out, they start whooping and hugging each other and hugging Clint and Marcy too. It’s a ridiculous reaction for something that they know has been there all along, but they can’t help it. It’s one thing to know. It’s another thing to see.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Colin asks, his smile fading as he looks between the wagon, the shopping cart, and their belongings strewn about the uneven brick pavers.

“Trying to sort out what we have room for,” Clint says with a questioning look at Marcy, but she isn’t sure what Colin is getting at either.

“You have room for all of it. I’m taking you to Elm Valley, of course,” he says, as though it’s already been discussed and decided.

“What do you—Don’t you want to stay here?” Marcy asks, risking a glance at Sienna.

She just smiles in response. “I’m going to go finish making dinner.”

“Nah,” he says. “I’ve got a mission now, haven’t I? Might be people in the valley in need of an apiarist.”

“But your daughter . . .”

“Is safe,” he says. “And healthy. And grown. She doesn’t need me as much as some other folks might.” Colin avoids looking directly at them, even though it’s clear they’re the folks in question.

Instead he picks up a framed drawing that Patrick gave her as a Christmas present when he was nine. It’s the three of them in front of their home in Cedar Grove, complete with smoke coming out of the chimney and the swing in the front tree. It’s one of the few sentimental items Marcy has carried from place to place. It’s more precious even than the photos, because he made it. Touched it. She feels closer to him when she has it near. Still, she’d been considering asking Sienna to keep it along with some of their other belongings in hopes they can come back for it someday. They need the space in the shopping cart for essentials.

“I’d like to see Elm Valley anyway.” Colin tucks the frame between quilts in the wagon. “And it seems like you shouldn’t have to give up any more than you already have.”

Marcy begins to argue on principle, but Clint stops her with hand on her arm. “Thank you,” he says, pulling Colin into a big bear hug.

“Besides,” Colin says, wiping his own tears and squinting at the setting sun again. “After all the stories I’ve heard, I want to meet him.”

* * *

Elm Valley is the first place in the new world that Marcy would call objectively beautiful. It’s not the same kind of beauty as she might have taken notice of before the world was on fire, not the kind that feels like a vacation or an escape. This is the kind of beauty she’s come to recognize as survival. The careful balance between resistance and acceptance. It’s like Colin’s beehives and her garden next to their broken-down van and the Morrison children running everywhere, completely unfazed to be in a world without all the things grownups had come to depend on.

At the suggestion of someone in the old sheriff's office, they set up temporary living quarters at a little house on the ridge that has just been vacated by another family. They offer Colin one of the bedrooms to keep his things between trips farther afield until he’s ready to move on for good.

On Colin’s first trip, he brings back a kitten that he found alone and shivering, hiding in an old tire. He named it Scout, because he said scout bees are the worker bees that leave to search for a place to start a new hive. Scout found herself a new hive with Marcy.

Clint’s suggestion to keep her an outdoor cat lasts two nights. The third night, Scout hops up onto the bed and curls up on Marcy’s chest and that’s that.

“What do you think Patrick is doing tonight?” she asks, scratching the cat under her chin as she nudges closer with a robust purr.

“Are you asking the cat or me?” Clint smirks, turning his head on the pillow.

Marcy lets him deflect. They don’t always play this game anymore. It too often leads to hard questions like when they should leave, and where they should go. And what they might find if they do. The closer they get to where Patrick is supposed to be, the more frustrating it is to not have a solid lead.

She drops Scout down between their feet and props herself up so she’s half on top of Clint. She kisses him, closing her eyes and brushing her lips back and forth on his stubbled cheek. “Why? Are you jealous?”

“A little bit,” he admits with a grin, cupping his hand around her neck to kiss her again.

“It’s kind of nice having something to care for. I miss my clinic. I miss being useful to people in a real way, not just throwing medicine at them as we pass through. I miss the days when it didn’t take all my energy just to exist.”

“There’s a clinic here,” he says softly. “Maybe you could see if they need your help. While I keep looking.”

It’s jarring to think about it. They worked separate jobs before, only saw each other for dinner and to catch up on their favorite TV shows at night. But it’s been them against the world for years now. It’s surreal to imagine going to work in a clinic all day, coming back here at night to find dinner and Clint’s warm smile waiting for her. To talk about their day because there are parts of their experiences that will be separate and unknown unless they share them. It feels scary in a way that new things feel scary, not because they’re bad, but because they might be good.

“I’ll think about it,” she says, scratching up under his shirt.

“I want you,” he says, twisting a lock of hair around his finger before tucking it back behind her ear. “You know that right?”

“I do,” she says, kissing the hinge of his jaw.

“Hey.” He resettles them and holds her face between his hands so he can look at her. “I need you, too. But I’m not just here because we need each other. You’re . . .” His Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he swallows whatever he was going to say.

“I know,” she says. They’ve been married long enough that he can say more with his eyes than he can with his words anyway.

She kisses him again, more slowly until he opens up and gives in to all the other options they have to tell each other how they feel.

They’ve both been changed by the journey. Their bodies are hardened, rougher, and more tender in places they’ve both had to relearn. When they join together like this now, it means something different than it did before. The stress they carry is so much greater, and so the willingness to offer each other a moment of reprieve, to offer their whole, present selves, feels much more powerful. It means something different to say _I want you_ in a world where wanting so rarely leads to having.

And so as she gives him what he wants, as he shudders against her, his breath heavy against her neck, she holds his head and says, “I want you, too.”

* * *

On Marcy’s first day in the clinic, she treats several minor wounds and a sprained ankle. Dr. Addy is old enough to be her father and so grateful for qualified help that he spends the first week teaching her everything he knows about natural remedies, how to tend the small garden of herbs and other useful plants, and where they keep the few supplies they have on hand, including a microscope and basic surgical tools.

She keeps adding patients to her list. She makes a few notes too, to remind her of who each person is, what they needed. She adds Mr. Thomas with the probable ulcer and Ms. Ryan with the cut on her leg from her old clinic in Cedar Grove. And Greg Brewer with his broken foot that she fought treating, before she remembered how closely-tied being useful and being normal were for her. Some nights, she reads the names with the asterisks, the ones who likely wouldn't have made it without treatment. There are now at least a dozen families between here and Cedar Grove who get to keep a loved one by their side because of her. That's not nothing.

After the second week, Dr. Addy claps her on the back, hands over his stethoscope, and says, “Congratulations, you’re the new resident physician of the Elm Valley Clinic.”

“What? No! I’m leaving soon!” she calls after him.

The next day, she stops by his house on the way to the clinic to try to reason with him. The house is empty. He’s gone.

Marcy is about to mount a very angry one-woman search party when someone finds her and tells her a whole family is sitting outside the clinic with a severe case of suspected food poisoning.

“I’ll be right there,” she says in her best patience-with-patients voice.

A week or so after her unexpected promotion, a tall man about Patrick’s age comes in clutching his arm to his chest.

“Hi,” he says in a light British accent. “Where’s Dr. Addy?”

“Gone,” she says, shrugging.

“Oh no. He’s been threatening to do that for a while. Glad to see he waited for a replacement, at least. I’m Tim, by the way. I don’t think we’ve met. I run the library.”

Marcy pales a little bit at the word _replacement_. “Dr. Brewer. Marcy, actually. What can I help you with?”

“Been on the road for three weeks. Got a little too excited over the prospect of breakfast at my own place this morning,” he says. He holds out his arm to reveal an angry welt. “Burned my arm,” he adds unnecessarily.

Marcy’s eyes widen. It looks like a second degree burn, but covers a wide part of his arm. “You sure did.”

She washes her hands in the basin and goes about treating him. Tim is chatty. He asks her what books she likes, and tells her he’s just come back from making a run to Elm Lake to pick up a cart of books from a shuttered bookstore there.

“Are you with the Brewers up on Seventh Street? I didn’t know there was a doctor among them.”

“No,” Marcy says with a sigh. She gets this question a lot. There’s a contingent of Brewers here, including Paul Brewer and his son, from Cedar Lake, which is somewhere farther west. It’s a common last name, and Patrick’s features are sort of generic. It has made sorting out his possible whereabouts more complicated. “My husband and I are from Cedar Grove, to the east about a thousand miles.”

Tim whistles. “Did you come all the way here on foot then?”

Marcy nods. “Most of it.”

Tim looks impressed. The corner of Marcy’s mouth tugs up in a smile. Sometimes it’s good to remind herself of how far they’ve come. Even if they’ve sort of stalled out again.

“My son was in Elmdale when we were evacuated. We’ve been trying to find him.”

“Never been down that way,” he says. “But my partner has once. Do you think he’s still there?”

She focuses on dressing the burn with a loose bandage while she answers so she doesn’t have to give away how frustrated she is at not knowing.

“Maybe. We heard he wasn’t. And then we heard that he might have come here, but it doesn’t seem like it. Every time we find someone who thinks they’ve met him, they say they’ve seen him in Elm Grove or Elm Ridge or Elm Falls or Elmwood and it never amounts to anything.”

“There’s too many Elms,” Tim says with a kind smile. “It’s almost like no one thought we might need to find each other without GPS.”

Marcy smiles back. “Typical lack of government foresight.”

He laughs, a big, raucous thing, and looks at her intently with eyes that are pale green and arresting. “Well next time I go to one of the Elms in search of books, I’ll ask around for you.”

“Thank you,” she says, trying to keep her expectations in check. For once, the problem is that they have too many leads, but each time they've followed one it's gone nowhere. Still, it’s been nice to tell people what she’s looking for and not be met by blank stares or apologetic smiles. It’s like optimism isn’t so scarce here, and people are willing to share what they have of it.

“You’re all set,” she says when she's finished, moving to the side so he can get down off the exam table. “I’ll mix up something and bring it by later to help with any itching and scarring.”

“Thanks. The library is just down past the river on Main next to the old sheriff's office. I live behind it.”

She nods and sees him out, then returns to her notes about burn remedies from Anna Morrison, which seem to be more useful than the materials she has from Dr. Addy anyway.

Later, when she goes to drop off the ointment she made, she can’t see Tim but she can hear him, rustling behind a pile of books.

“If you’ve come back to make more cracks about saving the world through literature, you’ll kindly fuck off,” he calls. “This is every bit as important as clean water and food and shelter.”

“I agree,” Marcy says, suppressing a laugh.

“Oh fuck.” Tim’s head appears between two stacks. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were my boyfriend.”

“Your boy—Oh.” Marcy hopes she puts the pieces together quickly enough to not make a fool of herself. “I’m just dropping off the ointment. Don’t use it for a day or two. Make sure you give the wound plenty of air first.”

“Thanks,” Tim says, wiping his hands on his pants.

“Hey Tim, what’s—Oh, hello.” Marcy turns to greet a compact man with dark hair turned silver at the temples.

“You’re about a minute too late with whatever you were about to say. I had a brilliant retort, too.” Tim points at him, and then kisses him. “Dr. Brewer, this is Jon.”

“Hi. You can call me Marcy,” she says, extending a hand.

“Marcy took over for Dr. Addy,” Tim says. “She and her husband are trying to find their son. You haven’t heard of someone named Patrick Brewer, have you? Maybe near Elmdale?”

“That sounds vaguely familiar,” he says. “He’s not one of the Brewers on Seventh Street?”

Marcy and Tim both shake their heads.

“Actually,” Jon says, tapping a finger to his mouth, “I think there was someone by that name running a sort of bare bones trading post in . . . Schitt’s Creek? I think? He was good-looking, dark-haired, tall, sort of brash. Wears fantastic sweaters, even though it’s hotter than the sun?”

Marcy’s heart lifts in her chest and then crashes. “No. That doesn’t sound like him.”

“Too bad. I thought for sure that was his name. He’s organizing a summer festival thing down there with a big marketplace or something. It’s a bit far but I heard a few people are thinking about going.”

“Ooh. Maybe we should go. Like a vacation,” Tim quips, tucking Jon into his side.

Jon laughs. “Remember those?”

“Sounds lovely,” Marcy says. And it does.

There’s something weirdly comforting about the pair of them cuddling and happy and talking about things that aren’t normal anymore as though they are. She’s starting to realize that there might be a point at which she and Clint have to decide they’re done looking, even if they haven’t found anything. But not yet.

Tim hands her a book before she leaves. “It’s a loan,” he says. “But there’s no late fees at this library. Because fuck that. Bring it back when you’re done.”

“Thanks,” she says, and means it.

That night, before they go to bed, Marcy hangs the picture that Patrick drew on a hook over the mantle of the fireplace. She knows she should resist moving in, but after so long on the road it feels good to have their things around them, not packed into tattered boxes.

She tells Clint about the summer festival and how Jon was almost certain someone named Patrick Brewer was running it, even though it didn’t sound like their Patrick.

“We should try to go. It might be a coincidence, but there will be people there from all over. We might be able to cover a lot of ground just by walking around the festival.”

“Schitt’s Creek doesn’t even sound like a real place,” Clint says. “I’m starting to think people are just making things up because they want to be helpful.”

“The name might be a joke,” she says. “But the summer festival sounded real.”

“Let’s ask Colin when he comes back. See if he’d like to come.”

“Okay,” she says, content with the plan. They’re trying to make short plans now, so they aren’t crushed when they don’t work out.

She keeps thinking of all the other possibilities. Patrick could be anywhere. Somewhere in the greater Elms, sitting in the Brewers’ barn outside Ashville hoping they come back, or. Or dead. She feels like she would know if he was dead. He’s such a big piece of her. Wouldn’t she feel it if he died? Even if he did, the fear of never knowing is starting to eclipse the fear of finding out the worst.

“Clint? Do you think we made a mistake, coming here?”

“No,” Clint says. “You’re the happiest I’ve seen you since we left Cedar Grove.”

Shame burns up Marcy’s cheeks. As much as she wants to find Patrick, it feels weird to think about leaving this place. She wishes Patrick had been here. Not only because then they would have found him, but also because then she would be allowed to like it here as much as she does.

“I don’t know if I should be,” she confesses. “Happy here.”

“Hey, no. Honey, I think, if he couldn’t get to us, Patrick would want us to be happy. That’s all we want, right? For him to be happy. I’m sure it’s the same.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, even though she isn’t sure at all.

* * *

Their garden here isn’t quite as resilient as the one with the super seeds. Most of this plot is made of fruits and vegetables left by the previous family or gifted from other people. Now that the sun makes a more frequent appearance and the rain is less torrential it seems to do okay. It’s encouraging that now even the vegetables best suited to the old world can make it work in this one.

On her day off from the clinic, Marcy picks through the cabbage and spinach for weeds. There are a lot of them; with the clinic, she hasn’t had time to do regular maintenance since they moved in. She stands up and stretches while she considers what tools she has on hand that might help.

“Bring the wheelbarrow, would you?” she calls to Clint, who is picking through the debris in the garage to complete the window box he’s building for Scout. “And the spade.”

“Not so much as a ‘please,’” Clint says as he delivers the wheelbarrow. “And while I’m working on a project for her cat to boot.”

Marcy is about to tell him where he can go for pleasantries when she catches sight of a man charging down the hill toward them.

She’s only let herself imagine once or twice since they got here what it would be like if Patrick were to find them instead of the other way around. So all she can think as the man gets closer and his features take shape is _it can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be_ until she’s sure it’s him. It's him. _It’s him._

“Marcy,” Clint says, his voice a husk. He sees it, too.

She covers a sob escaping from her mouth and then lets Patrick barrel into her arms.

“Mom,” he says.

He's smaller than she remembers, and his voice is deeper and tear-soaked. He's dirty and trembling and _here_. He's here.

“Patrick,” she says into his curly hair, squeezing him closer. Clint's arms close around both of them and eventually she extracts herself so she can just look at him, leaving a hand on his shoulder as though he might disappear if she lets go.

“Are you happy? Are you all in one piece?” Clint asks, pushing him far enough away so he can clap his hands on this shoulders and take a better look at him.

“I am,” he says. “I am now.”

Even with all the commotion, Marcy can’t take her eyes off him. So she doesn’t see the other man until Clint says, “Oh, hello,” in the direction of the gate.

“Hi,” he says, still trying to catch his breath. He’s taller than Patrick, and quite striking, with dark hair that rises high off his forehead and a nervous, nimble smile.

“Um, yeah." Patrick rubs at the back of his neck with a nervous smile of his own. Marcy knows that look; she smiles back at him, surprised but delighted. “So. This is David,” he says. “My husband.”


	5. But turning them on still means goodbye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've spent a lot of time thinking about the conversation that starts this chapter and what comes after it, but trying to meet reader expectations is hard, ya'll. I hope you like it. 
> 
> **Content Note:** At the end of this chapter is a postscript for the whole series. This postscript acknowledges the natural cycle of life and death. It is in vague terms, even more so than the rest of the story, and several people who read it told me it didn't even need a warning, but I never want to surprise you with that kind of thing. If you need to skip it, it will be very clear when it begins, because of the _italics_ and just. Well. You'll see.

They sit on the couch with a few inches of space between them until Patrick scoots closer and puts his hand on David’s knee. A knowing look passes between them, and Patrick responds with a squeeze of encouragement. It’s odd—not bad, but odd—to see her son engage in an entire nonverbal conversation with someone else and know that in many ways he is closer to this stranger than he is to either Clint or Marcy now.

But in other ways, every time Patrick looks at David, every time he touches him and smiles at him and knocks their shoulders together, she discovers another part of him. Another part of them both. Her sweet boy is grown up and so beautiful that her heart aches with it.

“I’m sorry you’re finding out this way,” he says as he takes a grateful sip of the glass of water she hands him. “I thought you were in Ashville or near there. If I’d known you’d come this far I would have—”

“No, no,” she waves him off. “Please. You couldn’t have known. Let’s not do what-ifs. Tell me what is.”

There's a long pause, like everyone is waiting for someone to speak first.

David puts his hand on top of Patrick’s on his knee and turns toward Marcy and Clint. “I should leave you all to catch up and spend some quality time with your son.”

“Stay,” Patrick says, weaving their fingers together.

“Mmm, I’ll be right outside. I’m going to check on Bear and make sure he hasn't murdered your cat.” Their giant, appropriately named dog introduced himself a few minutes after Patrick and David, shaking the mud off his thick black coat and splattering it all over Marcy’s grapevines.

“It might be the other way around,” Clint says.

David kisses Patrick’s temple and whispers, “I love you,” and Patrick says it back with such intimate fierceness that it brings tears to Marcy’s eyes. They’d hoped he was happy. They hadn’t known to hope for this.

As the screen door closes behind him, Marcy turns back to Patrick. “We love you so much,” she says, and this time, she says it like she should have said it every time they spoke. With all the strength she has.

“I love you guys, too,” he says.

“Tell us everything,” Clint prompts.

He talks a little bit about life in the bunker, but he glosses over a lot of it with a shrug. “There were good days and bad days.”

Mostly he focuses on the last few years. It’s getting hot as the late afternoon sun shines through the window. He pushes his sleeves up and Marcy sees the thick scar that runs along the inside of his forearm.

“Patrick,” Clint says, grabbing his hand and turning it. “What happened?”

“One of the bad days,” he says, pulling the sleeve back down again. “I’ll tell you another time.”

“I should have been there,” Marcy says, her brain working overtime to triage an injury she’s several years too late to. “I could have—”

“No. It doesn't bother me. You said no what-ifs. Only what is, remember?”

She nods, no longer happy with that policy.

He distracts them by telling the story of how he met David as a reentry coordinator for Bunker 13, where David was living. Tells them about his sister. His parents. He talks about Ray, who he still respects. Stevie, their best friend. And Ted, who he’s been close to since they spent a year in Bunker 8 together after Patrick gave up his suite in Bunker 10. And then he’s back to David, to their house above the old general store they’re going to turn into a more specific store.

“An apothecary, maybe. We just started talking about it on the way here.”

His face when he talks about his life, about the ways David challenges him and still makes everything okay, makes her heart swell so much it hurts.

“He seems like a really great partner, honey,” she says, exchanging a look with Clint. It’s still so surreal, having him here.

“He is,” Patrick says, near tears. “I looked for you for years. It took me a long time to realize it was okay to be happy with him, even though I couldn’t find you. But. I’ve never been happier in my life.”

"I'm so glad you didn't wait," she says. She promised no what-ifs, but she can’t help but wonder what might have happened if they’d arrived on June 10th as planned. If Patrick hadn’t switched bunkers, would he have met the same people? Would he have met David? Would he have needed him in the same way if Clint and Marcy were there, too? If any part of these years of separation were responsible for what he has now, she would do all of it again. Every day in the van watching rations dwindle and hope along with them. Every last step on that long, horrible road from Ashville to here. Every sleepless night. Every piece of bad news. Every minute of anticipatory grief about their worst fears being realized.

“Do you think David will come back in and talk to us?” Clint asks. “We’d like the chance to fall in love with him too.”

Patrick sniffles and nods. “I’ll go get him.”

“We have a son-in-law,” Clint murmurs, putting his arm across Marcy’s shoulders. “Why does that make me feel older than gray hair and a bad knee?”

“Maybe because you are old, baby.” She smiles and kisses him to take away the sting.

When the boys come back, they ask them about the wedding. David tells them about the vows, how he took the time to compose something heartfelt while Patrick stole from Mariah Carey, but his face is so easy to read, his dark eyes shining, that it’s clear he loved it. Patrick tells them that rain threatened to postpone the ceremony but they went ahead with it anyway, that people helped him set out tarps and tents to keep the ground dry. David describes the big oak tree where they got married, and how the community picked wildflowers and hung them from its branches. He tells them about the acorns the tree dropped for the first time since the fires, that they fell like hail the week after their wedding. He pulls one out of his pocket.

“I usually keep a couple on me. Here,” David says, handing it to her. “I picked this one up before we left. My mother, in the ceremony, said a marriage is made of little things multiplied by time. Like an acorn into an oak. It’s a reminder for me, I guess.”

Patrick makes a noise low in his throat. “I didn’t know that’s why you keep them.”

David just bites down on his smile and takes his hand again.

“Patrick told us a little bit about your parents. They sound lovely,” Marcy says, turning the acorn in her fingers. Its knicks and scratches are nearly buffed smooth from being handled.

David and Patrick laugh together, a pair of sharp, staccato sounds, like people whose bodies start to speak the same language after enough time together. “Lovely isn’t the word most people use.” David says with a knowing look at Patrick.

“You’ll like them when you meet them,” Patrick says.

“We will,” Marcy says, and tries not to worry about what her patients will do if she leaves.

They talk more. David tells them about the summer festival, and Marcy pieces together the misunderstanding with Jon at the library. She tells them they’d heard Patrick was in Schitt’s Creek, but someone had described him as a person who wears fantastic sweaters even though it’s hotter than the sun.

“I didn’t understand how clothes could be a distinguishing feature,” Clint says.

Patrick just laughs and looks at David like he _is_ the sun. “You will in time.”

Eventually, they get into what Clint and Marcy have been up to. They tell them about the van and the long walk with Colin, about Tennessee and the Morrisons and the clinic in Elm Valley, and everyone else who has kept them going.

“I can’t believe you came all this way,” Patrick says.

“Oh honey. You’re the most important thing in the world to us,” she says, patting his hand. “Nothing could have stopped us.”

“That’s not true,” Patrick insists. “I’m suitably impressed.”

“I don’t know,” Clint says, looking at Marcy. “There were days I thought your mom was going to pick me up and carry me on her back if that’s what it took.”

“You carried me some of the way,” she says softly, blinking back another round of tears.

The relief of Patrick, the surprise of David, the work of sharing their separate experiences and trying not to dwell on how it might have gone differently together, the uncertainty about where they go from here . . . it’s all simmering at the surface. She’s not sure which will spill over first.

“Well I am very glad you made it this far, Mr. and Mrs. Brewer,” David says. “You’ve saved us a lot of walking.”

Clint barks a laugh, and joy wins out, smoothing over the complicated mix of all that she’s feeling. There’s more to talk about, but joy seems like a good place to pause it.

“C’mon,” she says, standing up. “I’ll give you the tour.”

They all stand, too.

“Great. I want to see your life hacks,” Patrick says.

David rubs his palms across Patrick’s shoulders vigorously. “I thought we talked about ‘life hacks.’”

“Yes, and if there were ever an appropriate use of the term.” Patrick gestures with his hands like that says it all.

David’s look of fond annoyance in response is one Marcy understands viscerally.

“Let’s start in the garden,” she says, smiling at them both.

It’s just a garden, but it feels a little like starting where they left off on those long phone calls so many years ago. She’s in the process of telling them about the super seeds they used to stretch their time in the van, when she realizes she left out something important.

“We couldn’t have done it without you, Patrick. We wouldn’t have been ready. We wouldn’t have made it.”

“I’m glad you did,” he says softly.

He gives her another hug, in almost the same place as the first one, and doesn’t let go for a long time. She knows they’ll probably do this again and again, reach out just to make sure they're still here, say _Thank you_ and _How are you, really?_ and _I love you_ until those words banish all the residual worry and fear and grief that have been a constant for past several years.

“David, maybe you can help me get dinner going,” Clint says.

“Mmmkay,” he says. “Although I was hoping I would get more time to make a good impression before we had to involve my cooking skills.”

“Nonsense,” Clint says. “I like you a lot. You won't change that with potato and bean hash.”

“See you say that now, but.” David doesn’t finish, just follows with a shy smile and a final squeeze of Patrick’s bicep.

They eat dinner around the fire outside and then Marcy and Clint help them get settled in the room where Colin sleeps when he’s in town.

By the time she and Clint crawl into bed, there are still plans to finalize. Decisions to make. But she feels free to make them. For the first time in six years, she feels free.

* * *

The next day, Patrick and David bring her lunch at the clinic and she walks them down Main Street to introduce them around. They finish their tour at the library. She feels silly and transparent introducing David and Patrick to Tim and Jon, who are the first queer people she’s called friends in either world. She’s still trying to find a way to tell Patrick that she’s not blind to the things she and Clint could have done differently. Even amid the dangers of this world, she knows there are wounds from the old world that are harder to heal: ignorance, assumptions, even off-hand remarks that she didn’t mean to be harmful. She wants Patrick to know he doesn’t have to heal those wounds by himself.

* * *

All things considered, they haven’t been in Elm Valley that long. But in some ways, returning to the scrubby highway for the long walk south to Schitt’s Creek feels like leaving home. Really, it sort of is. They’ll stay with Patrick and David for the summer festival and then come back to Elm Valley with Colin and stop using the word temporary. They don’t have to leave again until they want to. And Patrick and David will come visit as often as they can. In the next year or two, they might even be able to use dispatch centers to resume their weekly calls.

She and Clint went back and forth on whether they should move. For the last six years, her sole motivating purpose has been to find Patrick. And they’ve come all this way. Now, she has to find a new purpose. In the end, it comes down to what it’s always come down to. Marcy has a clinic in Elm Valley. And they need her. She wants to stay where she is needed most.

As they get closer to the festival, they see more people on the road or camped alongside it. Some people are bringing wares, crafts, and artwork. Others carry instruments. Others just bring themselves, talking and making friends along the way. It's such a different feeling from all those lonely months of walking. Marcy has spent a lot of time on the road, but never when she is sure something good is waiting for her. Never when she is at peace with her destination. With the extra people, without the clawing fear, the walk is almost nice. It's the first time it feels like the new world might offer a peace the old world didn't.

When they get there, Patrick hugs them both, and they introduce him to Colin.

“I’ve heard quite a few embarrassing stories about you, young man,” he says, pulling him into a back-slapping hug.

David perks up. “Colin, can I interest you in some tea? I would like to hear a few of these stories.”

Patrick just laughs and then cries in Colin’s arms. “I guess that’s a price I’m willing to pay," he says, and then, “Thank you. For them.”

* * *

The festival itself is more beautiful than she expected. David’s hand is everywhere, from the layout to the signage to the schedule of events and performances to the inclusion of artists to groupings of goods in the market. But it’s also communal in a way she didn’t realize was possible yet. That part feels like Patrick.

Between festivities, Ted comes with an armful of notebooks and they compare their logs about medical procedures and remedies with their limited resources. She helps him see patients during the festival, and tries not to pick up a habit of making puns.

George treats them to a meal, which they eat around the big center table in the general store. It's a nice break from the festival, and offers a little time to get to know the Roses better. Stevie fills in all the gaps Patrick and David leave out when they tell stories, and spends a long time talking with Clint about how she wants to shape local government as chairperson. Alexis is delightful and funny. She is also one of the only people Marcy has ever met whose stories from before the world was on fire are more harrowing than her stories from after. Johnny and Moira are interesting and baffling, but Patrick is right, she likes them.

At dinner, Marcy recognizes something kindred in Moira. Marcy wears her resistence to this world in the lines of her face, deepened by a year on the road. Moira wears her resistence in the lines of her clothes that mean so much more than fashion now. Neither of them agreed to accept this world as it first presented itself. And neither of them would let it change them completely. As she and Clint tell the story of their trip to Elm Valley, Marcy catches Moira giving her an appraising look across the table with the slightest, unexpectedly soft smile on her face.

It’s going to be harder than she thought to leave.

Ray gives them a tour of Bunker 13 so Patrick doesn’t have to, and even as luxurious as it is, Marcy can’t imagine being trapped down there. There was something about the barn that felt authentic in a way this doesn’t. It was dire and scary and too crowded and it made it impossible to fool themselves for even one day that the world they would find when they finally got to leave would be dramatically different. There was no jarring reentry from the barn. Only temporary relief and then dogged perseverance. Marcy looks down the center light well to the depths of the bunker, then up at the hazy glass of the geodesic dome. It feels like a place that belongs to someone else’s story. A part of her is grateful it’s not hers.

“Do you ever wish you could say, ‘I told you so?’” Clint asks as Ray walks them back up the ramp and out the big overhead door at the top of it.

“Only very rarely.” His smile is thoughtful, almost bittersweet, as he drops his chipper tone. “There is not much satisfaction in being right about this.” Ray looks at the bunker for a long moment before turning back to them, his normal, cheerful smile back in its place. “Anyway, I just knew Patrick's parents would be as wonderful as he is. Now _that_ is something I am very happy to be right about.”

* * *

On the closing night of the festival, everyone who hasn’t gone home gathers around a bonfire in the center of town. Musicians and performers take turns, like an informal open mic night, and Patrick sits with Clint at the center of it. Clint borrowed a guitar from a woman they met from Elm Glen and he and Patrick bend their heads together, talking as they play low notes back and forth.

“Okay,” Patrick says, clearing his throat to quiet the low hum of voices. “This one is for my mom.”

He plucks the opening notes of “Here Comes the Sun,” her favorite song. He watches his own hands on the strings for the first few bars, and then he tips his head up to smile at her from under his lashes as he sings, “Little darling, the smile’s returning to their faces. Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here.”

“Here comes the sun, do dun do do,” Clint joins in on the chorus, grinning at Marcy because he knows he _really_ can't sing. She just shakes her head at him and blinks against tears pressing at her eyes.

“I see where Patrick gets it from, now,” David says, rubbing her back when she can’t keep the tears from flowing.

“What’s that, dear?”

“The need to perform embarrassingly public displays of affection.”

Marcy laughs, wiping her nose with her handkerchief. “You’re just lucky he didn’t get Clint’s voice, too.”

“Well.” David appears to search for a diplomatic response. “You said it.”

She laughs again and rests her head on his shoulder. Together, they watch their husbands play the rest of the song.

All the gathered performers try to play a final set of songs together. It’s been a long time since some of them have played with other musicians. Many of them have just been playing for themselves or their families, just to continue to exist as a person who makes art in the world. The whole thing is discordant and fumbling and beautiful. It’s beautiful.

* * *

They finish their trip with a picnic under the tree where David and Patrick were married, the leaves lush and green above them, a cool breeze whispering along their skin, birds chattering to one another in the canopy. David seems more comfortable here in the place where he became her second son, with all the stress of the festival behind him. He's bigger and louder and generous and teasing and bright. When they leave, she tells David she loves him very, very much, even though he’s not ready to hear it. Life is unpredictable enough, and she won’t risk never getting the chance to say it.

When they finally make it home to their yellow house on the ridge above Elm Valley, they unpack the essentials and go to bed early. Scout acts like they’ve been gone for months and burrows herself between their legs.

“Where do you suppose Patrick is tonight?” Clint asks, brushing his smile against her forehead.

She laughs, a little wild and so uncomplicated. Finally. “At home. With his husband,” she whispers, nuzzling into his chest. “And Clint. He’s so happy.”

He pulls her in closer, tighter. “He is.”

* * *

_A red oak tree emerges out of a patch of shaggy grass set several meters back from the sidewalk east of the old town hall. A lone sentinel, it has grown stout and wide for a century or more, its branches reaching out toward the corners of the empty lot from which it sprouted. For decades, its leaves sprang forth from the bones of winter, pink and delicate, until they found the courage to unfurl into a dark green canopy. They shivered in the wind and clung to the branches through the summer storms and each year, as if by magic, the summer heat left the air and soaked the green until it burst into a glowing red. Each year the leaves fell, drifting slowly to the ground until the last leaf landed gently on the fading green below. They formed a carpet across the earth, crunched under feet, and whipped up against passing cars before the winter snow buried them again._

_The oak rooted to this place before the town took shape around it. And it stayed there after the town emptied, fleeing outward and downward as the fires advanced. Like everything that survived, it bore the scars of its resistance. The west side was singed and truncated by lightning. The trunk was slashed. The leaves were muted by the light and strangled by the air and wilted by the heat. Without the seasons, the branches forgot when to sprout and when to fall and the result was that the tree often looked as if it was stuck somewhere in between what it used to be and what it was becoming._

_As the fires cleared and the clouds thinned, the town emerged from its own in-between. And the tree bore defiant witness to it all. Its trunk, more than a meter in diameter, is unassailable. Its knuckled branches claimed the air in every direction, such that using this piece of land for anything else has been unthinkable for generations._

_Before, when the illusion of balance existed, the tree was shelter. Shade against the bright sun, respite from the press of to-do lists and deadlines. After, alone in a world charred by its own undoing, it was nothing. Then a cool wind blew in, like the memory of changing seasons. A man held the love of his life against the trunk to kiss him after their first night together, and later, he married him under its branches. The town watched as they made promises that seemed unthinkable during the fires, and not only because of how much they had been changed by them. Love rushed in to prop up all that was heavy, and balance was restored._

_There was talk of a memorial at the tree ever since the first group came upstairs after the fires. It seemed like the thing to do, after tragedy. To make a collective place to deposit memories, to hold them close, and even loan them out should the need arise. But the longer the townspeople lived among the wreckage of the world, they realized the memories were inescapable. The landscape was drenched with them, flooded with loss. They didn't need another place to drown in the past. So the tree was spared a more official purpose._

_Which is why it is what it is now. A place where people sit alone, or sit together, or sit alone together. A place where people hold one another up. A place to start a journey. A place to restart one. Still shade for a dog near the end of his life. Still a respite for a man and his partner, whispering the secret to all their years together. Still, people keep coming to the tree when they need it. There are some who come to the tree just to lay their hands on the rough surface of its bark. To feel the supportive strength of it, the pulse of survival. More than any memorial they can design, the tree links them to a past and a future._

_Twice a year, a family separated by fire reunites under its branches, growing their ranks until one by one they, too, return to the earth that made them. In the branches of the oak, one warm September evening many decades after fires and weddings and reunions, a bluebird sings to a blackbird, and they take flight into the brilliant, cloudless sky together._

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write a Clint and Marcy story for a long time, and this universe, hard as it sometimes is, has always been one of my favorite places to come back to. Thanks for coming back with me and for your comments along the way.
> 
> Much thanks to my betas [Pants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smarty_Pants/pseuds/Pants) and [Likerealpeopledo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo). Pants, the original fic would never have happened without you, and you remain the most encouraging and helpful beta a person can ask for. Likerealpeopledo, I enjoyed talking through March and Client with you. If it weren't for you this would still be 300 words in the POV of a tree so you've saved us all, but especially me. Thanks for being you.


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